Google has amazing people. It is often said that engineers find working at Google a humbling experience. This is absolutely true. It took me less than a day to realize that the guy sitting next to me is clearly much smarter than I am [..] without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be measured).
This strikes me as a problem, rather than an achievement. Google seems to be jam packed with highly intelligent eggheads, but Google isn't a pure science company - they're trying to work with consumers too. Most of the most successful businessmen and entrepreneurs I know don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic) as they need a wider range of faculties like common-sense, charisma, creativity, and "emotional intelligence."
Maybe this guy's in the engineering department and Google does hire a lot of creatives, business types, and what not, but their products have a rather sterile edge that makes me think the engineers always win over there..
Google believes in data only. Designers are not used to justifying their ideas with data.
While no one comes out and says it, the implication is that most of what constitutes the design profession is mere flimflammery. You don't need a designer to tell you what shade of blue to pick when you can just A/B test a few hundred shades.
Bullshit. For example, do you honestly think that Android UI was done in a data-driven way from the scratch without designers?
Google uses data to tweak experience of their existing products like Search UI. That's it. Designing interfaces for new products or features is done by designers (or in some case, like many Google Labs products, by developers).
You're right, I should have qualified that. That said, there are a lot of people working as designers in Google, but in my experience they are essentially user interaction designers.
The more woolly aspects of design -- like picking a different font just because of how it "feels" -- Google's pretty hostile to that. There's a default concept of "Googliness" which everyone understands to be a kind of high-energy, primary-color blandness with near-magical UI. There aren't a lot of projects that deviate from that, no matter what the designer thinks.
If you compare it to the kind of design variety you see at Yahoo or even Microsoft you'll see what I mean. At Yahoo a lot of projects are almost led by design, for good (Flickr) or ill (almost everything else). And there are design principles of Flickr which Google could never accept, like "serendipity". The idea that a user interface could be deliberately not laser-efficient, in the name of promoting exploration and community engagement, would totally baffle Google managers and they wouldn't tolerate that kind of designer-talk.
Heaven forfend one should use an attractive font on a Google product.
Seeing the incredible engineering innovations going on at Google, and the incredible UI innovations going on elsewhere, makes me a little sad - never the twain shall meet, and instead they're redeemed to making shallow copies of each other and never quite hitting the spot. Over-designed and under-engineered, or vice versa.
Adding design-led products or hiring more designers, however, would kind of change what Google is about IMO. Can engineers be taught design? ;)
Have you ever considered that maybe designers have created a culture that is not quite congruent with reality, and that their perception of a good interface is not, in fact, always a good interface?
Engineers like the Google style, but so do lots of my acquaintances who are non-engineers, from scientists to writers to school teachers.
Designers seem to be the only demographic with a problem.
I agree sorta, but only for the more tweaky visual design aspects, rather than interaction design.
If anything, I see Google as actually less data-driven in its design than many areas. Industrial psychology and HCI are traditionally very big on data-driven design for interaction design, with a big focus on Methodologies, quantitative measurement of task performance improvement, and various other statistical evaluation metrics. But the main downside of that is that you can't really answer open-ended design questions: you can A/B test between two specific proposed interfaces, and determine A causes N% of users X quantity less hassle than B does (or whatever your metric is), but if you want to invent an entire new interface, you're basically doing a random walk in design space, which will take a really long time to get anywhere. I mean, imagine how many A/B questions you'd have to ask to invent the Gmail interface, using, say, the Hotmail interface as your starting point, and having to justify every change you make from that starting point using data.
I suppose it depends on your norm, though--- Google is very data-driven by the web-design standard, but sort of loosey-goosey, anything-goes compared to the much more statistics-and-methodology-heavy design practices that go on in traditional engineering and HCI.
The focus is on engineers. Google seems to hire people with exactly the qualities you mention to work directly with the consumers, and leave the hyper-genius engineers where they prefer, away from real people ;) Although there is an element of intelligence and also of having a technical background for many of the consumer-facing roles too.
No, not meaning that at all. Claiming anyone not in the top 1% is "stupid" is ridiculous. A lack of indexable intelligence and "stupidity" might correlate, but are not linked. "Smarts" != intelligence.
This strikes me as a problem, rather than an achievement. Google seems to be jam packed with highly intelligent eggheads, but Google isn't a pure science company - they're trying to work with consumers too. Most of the most successful businessmen and entrepreneurs I know don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic) as they need a wider range of faculties like common-sense, charisma, creativity, and "emotional intelligence."
Maybe this guy's in the engineering department and Google does hire a lot of creatives, business types, and what not, but their products have a rather sterile edge that makes me think the engineers always win over there..