Google, in cooperation with UNICEF and OLPC, launched Our Stories yesterday. And while I think it’s a great idea, it’s also a wonderful example of the fact that web “experiences” often are little more than a reflection of the company that created them.

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

This approach works well for many Google applications, but these applications are typically utilitarian in nature. They’re designed to enable you to get things done. Our Stories does not have this goal. It’s purpose is not to help you quickly find information, send an email, or create a document. It’s purpose is to connect you to the world around you. But the site’s design doesn’t encourage this connection at all.

Consider the Find a Story page, which should be the heart of the user experience. You choose a collection of stories to view from a cold, ugly dropdown menu, and then you’re shown a very Google-esque list of stories, complete with linked titles, story summaries, and meta information - in this case, a note about where the story was recorded.

Choose a story to view, and you see a simple white page with a video and the story summary.

If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

They had a good idea in using a Google map as the primary exploration device on the site, but they didn’t follow it through. The map is just sort of thrown onto the page beneath a long block of text, like an afterthought. How ’bout turning Our Stories into a Google Earth feature, flipping Satellite view on by default (so the environment is more real and therefore more compelling), and letting people really dig in and look around the world for stories? (Just one of a hundred things they could have done.)

Web experiences can’t always be simply a reflection of a company’s culture. Sometimes they need for a company to step up and coax it into something that reflects the message behind the experience.

Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.

Posted by Robert on December 11th, 2007