

Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers - kostyk
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-google-engineers-designers

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pavlov
_In the world of the hippo, you ask the chief designer or the marketing
director to pick a blue and that 's the solution. In the world of data you can
run experiments to find the right answer._

"Hippo" is an acronym for "highest paid person's opinion". Clever, but are we
to believe that this dichotomy represents the whole spectrum of decision-
making processes?

The Achilles' heel of data-driven approaches is that setting up the
experiments can constrain the possible solutions too early. When you test 50
shades of blue, the answer you get will always be a shade of blue. A design-
driven process could give you solutions that go beyond tweaking one value in
CSS -- but that research won't be something that you can stick into an Excel
spreadsheet.

~~~
fsk
If you know statistics and do it correctly, you can reduce the chance of a
false positive.

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monoid
While I believe in testing, I doubt that the new shade of blue is solely
responsible for an extra $200m a year in revenue. Even if all the testing was
done at the same time, the period with the alleged revenue increase was
obviously later and during a whole year. So during that year a lot of other
things including external market situations influenced the revenue change.
Meaning there is no clear link between the shade of blue change and the
revenue increase. Ofc a change of blue worth $200m / year makes a better
headline, even if it's rubbish talk.

