

Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/business/10ping.html

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BvS
“It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need.”

Right but that's not what Google is doing, they listen to what users do. This
is not the same.

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Alex3917
I don't think Bowman understands the difference between design and art.

As Nate Silver says, predictability = designability. If you can predict which
elements will elicit a certain reaction from a user, then you can design an
experience to elicit that reaction. Data isn't optional in design, it's the
sine qua non. It's not a coincidence that design is a synonym for fate;
without data design doesn't exist.

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siculars
"Already his team has unveiled a major design overhaul. On the margin of
users’ pages they added a search box and a list of “trending topics,” subjects
that are most popular with tweeters at a given time."

seriously? the placement of that search box and trending list really set the
world on fire. i'm not really hating on twitter, but common - a search box and
a list of data on the right margin? they should have mentioned the saved
searches. better yet, bowman should have landed with twitterrific, twhirl or
tweetie.

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gsmaverick
In fact, Bowman had very little if anything to do with this latest redesign.
This design had been around for months in beta testing already.

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dhs
Google asks its employees to spend 20 percent of their work time to basically
design stuff that doesn't have to be accounted for by any data. I assume that
they get a steady input of raw design that way, and that they are not
dangerously impoverished there, or in danger to become so.

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jtbarrett
I didn't see any examples of a case where design was "held back by a tyranny
of data" in the article. Maybe a data-centric view is cumbersome, but Google
clearly feels strongly that it's worth the price.

Designers should be free to create something innovative, but I see no problem
with judging the results with real metrics.

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sachinag
Look, if the argument is that Google products are poorly designed and so the
user experience isn't as good as it could be if you had a "real designer",
then take Yahoo BOSS and build your own damn engine with a nice design.

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ThomPete
Well Cooliris is rather designed and it is a hell of a service many million
times better than google images for instance.

But of course google is in the data business they are not in the design
business so you can't really blame them.

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zck
Google's reliance on data for everything sounds like they should watch out for
overfitting (as in machine learning). Presumably, they're doing so, but it's
an interesting thought.

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zaidf
The two aren't mutually exclusive.

