Google's new Finance site is really quite elegant. The site offers information on North American stocks, mutual funds and public and private companies along with charts, news and fundamental financial data. Different things to watch for here are interactive charts, and the blog and discussion group retrieval. Most of the other tear sheet type information, e.g. news, company profile (description), and finances you'll find on all of the other finance sites as well.

The line/spark line chart scrolling is cool. it automatically scrolls to the news for the period you are browsing in the chart. You can also change the range of dates in the chart by resizing the year widget -- mouse over the years at the top of the chart and a little resizing widget appears. When you drag and resize the date range, the main line graph shrinks or expands to show better detail on that range and the news box on the right refreshes to show only the items in that date range. Very nice, clean and simple use of AJAX.

Don Norman recently attempted a simplicity backlash after a few articles touted Google's simple UI as one of the reasons for it's success. Most of these simplicity articles talk about the spareness of its search interface as opposed to Yahoo's, for instance. Finance people are also saying that Google is not presenting a clear enough strategy and that their tools are all over the place. I might agree with that. They have a lot of applications that never seem to make it out of Beta.

Norman says that the simplicty factor breaks down when you try to do anything outside of searching web corpus. His argument is valid. If you view Google as a suite of tools for retrieving information, there is often a disconnection between the bodies of indexed data. The problem is rooted partly in poor information architecture problem and partly in poor interaction design. Norman is saying, I think, that the site doesn't yet allow the integration of the pieces into one UI, and rather segments it by application (and dare I say, by working group within Google?).

But when they do rich applications like Google Maps and this new Finance site, they DO do it rather simply and elegantly. (The Google News Reader on the other hand, ugh! That thing needs to take a lesson from these Beta apps.) With Maps and Finance their focus and execution on the functionality of simple little interaction widgets, e.g. moving a Google map around with a cursor, changing a data set range with a scrolling widget, is what sets them apart. In the end, our discerete interaction with specific tools is what is simple, and it's why I continue to use them over other sites. I don't care if their products are siloed and perhaps require poking around in the labs or clicking tabs to find them. When I get there, there is very little menu cruft in the way and it lets me get the job done quickly and efficiently.