

Google's "designer drain" - adamhowell
http://adamhowell.org/2009/03/20/googles-designer-drain/

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bprater
Committees are death. They suck the life out of every living thing.

I suspect that this is why Apple continues to thrive. It's very opinionated.
One guy at the top is making huge sweeping decisions that wouldn't fly in a
committee.

~~~
timcederman
This is exactly why. Steve makes "impossible" demands that the engineers claim
they can't meet (but in the end, do) and design decisions that sacrifice
features for aesthetics (which users will "hate", but invariably become a huge
success).

I love that Apple decided to ship a cell phone missing a stack of features
because they knew they had what was REALLY important to the user already in
there. And that they spent time getting the little things right (like nice
transitions, and a unified look and feel) rather than add more features.

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timcederman
I disagreed with this statement:

"Test driven design certainly has a huge place on the web — but it has to
coexist with opinionated design. Otherwise you’re just giving the user what
they think they need."

Actually, it's not that at all. If you're basing on how people react, it's not
what they "think they need", you're basing decisions on actual behaviour.
Adam, you're thinking of user research.

~~~
adamhowell
Both. For example, when Presently/Goog Presentations was started the small
team wanted to try and innovate. But as users were tested they didn't
understand why it wasn't more like Powerpoint. And so attempts at innovation
were trumped by user testing.

~~~
chris11
So how do you use research to differentiate between users not understanding a
product feature, and users not needing that feature?

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ctingom
The issue I have with the word "designer" is that in this case it is meant to
imply "visual design only." I like to think of myself as far more than a
"makes it look pretty" designer.

For example, I work with customers all of the time and design their web
application interfaces, and the "interaction design." I spend a lot of time
working on the information that needs to be presented, and exploring various
ways to make pages easier to use. To me, that's design.

~~~
ojbyrne
Some programmers out there hate the fact that their jobs mean "make the back
end work," when in fact they know plenty about usability and interaction
design. It cuts both ways.

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unalone
Did you just redesign your site? I swear it looked different a few hours ago.

"Or, as Joe Clark more bluntly put it in his post Google Smothers Designers,
“[t]his is, after all, a place where usability head Irene Au recapitulates her
own math nerds and derides typography as something twee designers fiddle with
to make pages “breathe.”… Welcome, Irene Au, to the title of Worst Enemy of
Web Design.”"

That's awful. Typography is the largest part of the average web site. Text
takes up more space than anything. It's worthy of extensive focus.

~~~
adamhowell
Nah, redesigned it last week in an effort to motivate myself to get back into
blogging.

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blasdel
Surprise! Egotistical CS Assholes and Affected Designer Douchebags will always
antagonize one another.

~~~
Semiapies
Yeah, I have to be skeptical of the idea that the "Aspergian geeks" (to quote
a linked post) are crushing the designers. If that complaint were true, Google
stuff would look more like Jakob Nielsen's design aesthetic.

How significant are the designer departures? How many designers does Google
have?

~~~
adamhowell
Yeah, I went back and forth about linking to Joe Clark's post b/c he goes over
the top more often than not -- but there's also truth behind his hyperbole
here, so I included it.

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SingAlong
>> "Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades
between each blue to see which one performs better."

That surely is an overkill. Why do they have to decide between 41 shade of
just blue? Instead they could have had a hackday kind of event and asked the
designers to come up with his/her own designs based on a basic layout and then
combine the best features (and colors maybe) of each design.

~~~
sgk284
Because when they do that, they get burned badly. For instance, when I was
working there Larry Page said that they had never used yellow as the
background color for ads becsuse it reminded them of "piss". This decision
lasted a a long time until they did a whole bunch of A/B testing. Yellow
turned out to increase click throughs significantly (can't post percentage,
but well into double digits).

So now they back tracked on their original decision which was based on opinion
and instead use the one that actually has good data behind it and wound up
making them millions upon millions more. Sometimes they'll restrain colors to
stay within a theme knowng that the best they'll get is a local maxima, but
when you've got the number of users that Google does, it makes sense to try 41
shades of blue, because you'll sometimes find that just a handful
significantly outperform the others, and the probability of you having picked
them as a designer with no testing or data is pretty small.

Designers hate how Google does things, but the results speak for themself...
The methods used work really well.

~~~
johndoe
But. If they were successful and made money without having to use pissy yellow
color, did they truly need to switch to it to cater to the lowest common
denominator ? Are the dumbasses who clicked more when the color was of piss
worth it ? do you truly need users that act like animals, more on impulses
than on thought ?

Should you cater to the lowest common denominator and be the Microsoft of the
web, or try to do the Best Thing and have a smaller market share but of much
higher taste and disposable income, aka the Apple ?

~~~
prospero
If your goal is to have people click on your ads, what other denominator is
there than the click-through percentage? Google is a middleman for
advertising, it's not for them to judge whether their viewers are worthy of
clicking on their ads.

And do you really think there's a socio-economic divide along the lines of
blue vs. yellow text ads? Because that's pretty ridiculous.

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jodrellblank
That designer's site has thin black text on a dark blue background.

It's horrible to read.

~~~
adamhowell
Thanks for the feedback, I darkened up the text a bit. But if the blue is
looking that dark you might want to check your monitor's settings, it's been
readable in my (admittedly) limited testing.

~~~
enneff
I have my monitor hardware colour calibrated and it's very hard on my eyes.

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chiffonade
These designers who went to work for google strike me as incredibly naive.

Google was founded by two computer scientists, helmed by a former electrical
engineer, and stacked to the rafters with mathematicians and statisticians.
Their original investors were exactly the same types.

Can anyone think of another type of firm that fits this general description?
That's right people - hedge funds!

Can you imagine a visual designer walking into a hedge fund and expecting free
creative reign? It's absolutely naive. They were working for a bunch of quants
and numbers people that are turning the online advertisement industry into a
derivatives trading market.

Read that last sentence again.

Google is Wall St. West without suits or ties, I don't know why more people
don't understand this better. They're blinded by bright colors I guess.

~~~
menloparkbum
_turning the online advertisement market into the new derivatives trading
industry. It's basically Wall Street West._

That is a good way to put it. But, I doubt most people think of Google in that
way, including engineers.

~~~
chiffonade
> But, I doubt most people think of Google in that way, including engineers

You can bet the people calling the shots at Google are thinking of it that
way.

