| He didn’t announce it via cake, but Doug Bowman quit his job as head of Google’s visual design team last week, citing the company’s “reliance on data” for design decisions as the main reason for his departure. Bowman writes on his blog that he’ll miss Google’s “incredibly smart and talented people” and the “occasional massage,” but not “a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.” We’ve asked before whether too much data can endanger patients and cause bad writing; might it also diminish a company’s workforce? (HT: Noah Harlan) [%comments]
The Downside of Google's Data Obsession
TAGS: data analysis, Google
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Companies typically operate by making their decisions based on digested data.
Companies typically excel by making intuitive leaps based on the wild-haired ideas of a small number of charismatic individuals.
They also often fail by following wild-haired ideas.
Google didn’t get where it is today by looking at data. These days they’re just churning recycled ideas into the next quarter’s business plan.
I’m not really seeing the downside here, other than that they’re losing one employee because of it.
Google recently spelled out this very issue in its “official” blog. The idea being that data from web traffic is more important than assumed aesthetic qualities.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/make-sense-of-your-site-tips-for.html
Seems silly to me. With millions of users and a system that is end-to-end customizable there is no reason not to test assumptions of the UI designer. Not to say that said wizard should not give direction and form, but that it’s not out of line to validate those decisions with hard data from subtle user feedback/uptake of new design decisions.
Sounds more like the best being the enemy of the good in this case.
Eric, I think the key here is that the employee they lost is one they brought in to fill a very specific gap, and their reliance on data is preventing him from doing so. Essentially, it is not just an employee, but an entire approach that is being discarded.
@Dennis
“I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.”
He got bored of defending his decisions. Decisions that affect millions of users and can be easily tested with Google infrastructure. While he is probably right that the debating of such low level choices seems counter productive, every tenth of a percent of users count for the bottom line and with the tools they have at their disposal there is no reason not to validate.
Fair play to him. Google was created with enthusiasm and thinking outside the box. Now that it’s reached “the” threshold in terms of business size, it can’t operate that way anymore without scaring shareholders etc so it needs the boring reliability of data.
As a statistician, I do not recommend relying on data at all because there are too many people like me producing figures the way we want
Data isn’t collected in a vacuum. Data oriented people are driven by the same whims they claim strike and cloud the good sense of designers and artistic types. What data to collect? How to analyze it? What correlations to check? The only difference is that designers and artistic types aren’t self righteous, hypocritical, and narrow minded enough to claim otherwise.