Google Calendar Presentation and Design

Found a presentation on how Google Calendar was made here.

Some good quotes from the slide deck....

Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible Alan Kay, Disney Fellow and VP of R&D, The Walt Disney Company

Great Design - It's that ineffable quality that certain incredibly successful products have that makes people fall in love with them despite their flaws. Joel Spolsky, Great Design

Some really good information taken away from the slide deck were.....

• Always have an eye on the minimum useful feature set that most people will use
  • Talking to a grandma in NYC
  • A mother loves quickadd and then prints out the calendar for the fridge
• Product usage tracks directly to how easy a feature is to find & use.
  • Creating calendars = easy
  • Finding calendars = not easy enough
• Figure out what you absolutely have to get right and relentlessly refine it.
  • Redesigned the "event page" at least 3 times
  • Kept adding new ways to get events into the system up until days before we launched
• Don't spend too much time on the less important areas.
  • Know where you'll get the most bang for the buck