| 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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Another impressive description of Google fine-tuning design according to traffic data: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/search-experiments-large-and-small.html
The problem is that data can be very myopic. Yes, maybe a green button attracts more clicks than the blue button chosen by a designer — this data is very specific and testable.
However, many other things are not: how does the green button affect a user’s perception of the entire page? the brand? of green buttons? Which is more important to Google? Having more people click on a button or maintaining a consistent, positive consumer experience?
Data gives designers the power to make better decisions — there is no decision inherent in data. Google’s culture apparently ignores this important principle, and I completely understand why a designer would leave in frustration.
Maybe this guy shouldn’t be a staff employee anywhere, but work on a project basis as an independent contractor solely on new projects (where you determine how users will come to new major functions and how the elements in a function will appear), not established products in their maintenance phase (where you obsess over a 2 pixel difference in the next release because that’s all there is to obsess over). Friend, if you were going to go corporate in Palo Alto, you should have joined IDEO and not Google.
Sounds less like an over-reliance on data as the primary problem here and more perhaps on an instance of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.
“Prove it” when it comes to selecting which is better of 3-5 pixel widths seems like a response from someone who just wants to be obstinate.
I think the real solution is not to change the engineering culture, but to set a clear chain of command, so at the end of the day, someone has the authority to say “it’s 5 pixels cause that’s the way I likes it, we’ve got bigger fish to fry, and I’m making an executive decision.”
One of the best ways I’ve found to avoid this sort of nonsense is to avoid meeting creep- where everyone and their uncle’s manager shows up for design meetings. You can’t get any decisions in such a meeting. Keep it pared down to 2-3 principle people and you’re much less likely to get people debating the color of the bike shed because they like the sound of their own voice.