Whenever you are working in a large team towards a common goal it is difficult to ensure that all team members are moving in the right direction. Defining a vision (I personally prefer the term "intent") helps a team to stay on track by guiding and supporting the decision making process.

Google’s User Experience Principles are one of these tools that help design teams stay on track and they reflect how most of us expect to experience Google’s services.

The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is "Googley" – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world.

The ten principles that drive design decisions and contribute to a "Google User Experience" are:

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

While are the first glance these principles still seem very high level, my impression is that they are valuable because the primary objective of these principles is not to design new user experiences but to facilitate decision making - decisions between different design and implementation alternatives.

But here is what I don’t understand:

Why Google would post them on their website?  Are these guidelines just an "explanation" and "justification" of "Google’s User Experience"?

Do they help to educate user what a "Googley" user experience is and influence their expectations of Google’s products?

How does it affect you when you read "Every millisecond counts" but the performance of your Google Reader is slow? Will it make you think that "at least they tried" and positively impact your user experience?

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