Recently Marissa Mayer spoke at the Google Developer I/O Conference. This video has been promoted elsewhere but I thought it was worthwhile to promote again. The elements of web innovation and design approach, using Split A/B testing and the value of metrics is simply too important in our industry to go unnoticed. I think when people look back at Google’s success, their analytical approach to testing will go down as one of their key pillars. Eric Schmidt discussed its importance recently as well.

Here are some of the highlights from the video that I thought were great:

• Story of why the Google home page is the way it is
• The fact that Google even A/B tests white space; imagine testing negative space as a practice
• Number of search results on a page; this is a dangerous one to blindly follow because I think it depends on how much data is on each search result but Google’s finding through regression testing that there is direct correlation between number of search results and results on the page
• Making a product faster, you get that back in product usage: SPEED MATTERS!

Definitely check out the video, Marissa covers a lot of other interesting topics beyond the analytics as well discussing things Google is considered and how they are viewing things.

The story was also covered over at Yahoo!