By: Emily
Watching and discussing TED talks is a great way to get more insight on a topic or listen to other points of view. The TED talk I watched was by Margaret Gould Stewart titled, “How giant websites are designed for you (and a billion others, too)”. This was very interesting and gave me an insight on the process of designing a website for the users to effectively communicate through. Stewart worked with big companies such as Google, YouTube, and currently Facebook and shares in this video how those companies successfully manage and set up the sites for optimal usage. These large scale companies cater to a lot of people, making it a big task to change various features. To give you a taste of the major scale these companies are working with, Google processes over one billion search queries a day, and every minute over a hundred hours of video is uploaded to youtube; that’s more in a single day than all three major U.S. broadcast in the last five years combined. (1:09) Stewart stated that when designing for such a large scale “it requires a combination of audacity and humility”. (1:46) When designing a website used for communication, there’s no such thing as a little detail. Every small detail is important to the website and it’s function as a whole. For example, The Facebook button seems like a miniscule issue when considering redesigning, but, this button is seen on average of 22 billion times per day making it an important part of the website, and the designer remaking the like button spent over 280 hours over the course of months working on it. Our digital lives play a large part in our daily communication, and when dealing with something this prevalent, you have to understand who you’re designing for and the importance of it.
Works Cited
Margaret Gould Stewart. TED. "How giant websites are designed for you (and a billion others, too)” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 5 August 2014. Web. 8 November 2016.
This is a great post about the topic of big websites. I like that there are time stamps to help explain details of the topic. Adding the actually TED talks video is great. This post makes me want to learn more about how giant websites are designed!
ReplyDeleteThank you! Large websites and the way they work are very fascinating especially because we use them daily and normally don't think about all the work that goes into it.
ReplyDelete