MOUNTAIN VIEW - Following Google's recent public acknowledgement that aesthetics and user experience haven't been a high enough priority, the multi-billion dollar search giant recently announced the hiring of top Craigslist designer, Trés Terne. Terne — a longtime friend of Craig Newmark — joined Craigslist in 1996, and guided the site through both of its minimal redesigns.
Trés Terne is best known for his dislike of capital letters,
and for his decision earlier this year to change the
background of Craigslist from #EEEEEE to #FFFFFF.
"We knew it was time to bring in some fresh blood," Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, told a panel of bloggers at the recent Global Technology Conference in San Francisco. "We knew that design and user experience just weren't encoded deeply enough into our DNA, but Trés is going to change all that."
Terne will report directly to Mayer, but will continue to work from the Peet's Coffee in South Beach.
Technology pundits have been predicting a restructuring of Google's UX, or User eXperience, team since it began hiring out-of-work designers following the closing of GeoCities in October of 2009. The effort is thought to be in response Google's desperate attempts to sort out its flailing social networking strategy.
"It's true we haven't been as successful in the social networking space as we would like to be," Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt recently wrote on his MySpace page. "But we're pretty sure we're on the right track now."
Terne said the decision to accept the position with Google was "a total no-brainer."
"google has always been considered a mecca for designers," Terne wrote on his LiveJournal blog. "i'm really looking forward to implementing a/b testing, and to finding out which of 41 gradations of blue users are most likely to click on."
When asked whether Terne was Google's top choice, Senior Recruiting Specialist Beverly Lindquist, who asked not to be named because she hasn't been cleared to talk to the media, said they had also spoken with multiple designers at Slashdot, but that Terne's background in Computer Science and High Energy Particle Physics made him a stronger candidate for the design position. Slashdot, which specializes in news for nerds and stuff that matters, is widely regarded as one of the most progressive online communities still written in Perl, and has undergone almost twice the number of redesigns as Craigslist since 1999.
Terne will initially be in charge of all design aspects of Google's rumored "Google Me" initiative, then gradually move over to the Android team in order to help the increasingly popular mobile platform compete against Apple's iPhone.
"the android operating system needs to be much easier to use than it is now and we totally get that," Terne recently posted to Orkut, the most popular social networking site in Brazil and India. Although he did not provide additional details, Terne is reportedly intrigued by technology Google is currently experimenting with which may one day replace the virtual keyboards found on most modern smart phones. The system allows users to press down on the screen with a sharp plastic stick and draw symbols that the operating system will sometimes recognize as letters.
Terne recently set aside time to answer questions from reporters and bloggers on the #craigslist IRC channel, but nobody could figure out how to join.
In addition to overhauling its design team, Google may be shoring up other areas of its business to help it become more successful in the social networking space. Technology news blog TechCrunch recently reported that job offers may have already gone out to Facebook's top privacy advocate, as well as the head of branding at the popular Russian social networking site, Chatroulette.
