Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google
stopdesign.com
stopdesign.com
That's pretty damning. Google has always had a very developer-centric environment - and backing up design decisions with data definitely seems like a logical extension of that.
> "I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong."
It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. It seems like it's far too safe for them to go with what they know and what's been tested rather than something new and challenging.
A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.
Actually the evolutionist in me thinks this is pretty cool but I can still understand why a designer would want to quit.
41 shades does seem a bit of a gimmick. I doubt it really matters that much, or that most people can even tell the difference.
When you're running a business and the decision is whether or not to convert, trusting the majority is the only decision. If others see it as mediocrity, so be it.
Both answers are fine, of course, the important thing is the "why."
And if he's just being sarcastic, my opinion still applies. :)
Of course this type of testing only works where you can measure the results and the number of options to be tested are low compared with the number of tests. If you look at the whole layout of a page then then there are just too many dimensions for this type of testing to be practical. A designer could perhaps argue that changing the background colour, the border colour and using a bigger red button would be the best option. A designer could also argue that they are optimising for 'overall experience' rather than some measurable metric like clicks.
I think this all goes to show why both designers and 'measurement geeks' need to work together on these things.
End-user design is about creating a usable experience and often deriving an emotion to make them want to do it again, a process that relies on color combinations, layout, typography, etc. -- the complete package. I'm less attached to GOOG webapps because they lack subtle things such as sound feedback. I've found sound to be critical in software usability, far more important than very minor color discrepancies. That is, when software goes outside of very basic operations, and requires more attention from the end-user.
(Fighting about the shade of blue makes me puke in my mouth at the thought of such a corporate cliche).
Furthermore, this type of color testing would need to be extended to cover cultural differences to be truly effective. Colors will trigger completely different responses in China, Japan, France, etc, often the exact opposite of American counterparts.
Honestly, I think the engineers have a place AFTER a design has been released and there is data to mine and analyze that takes into account the entire product presentation as a whole. Interjecting them in the design process too soon and giving their opinion overriding power is a mistake. It's akin to slapping memcache on your back-end before you've done an ounce of optimization on your queries.
Very little is worse than web pages that use sound. It's no accident that most sites don't use sound, your tastes are just way outside the mainstream on this.
> Interjecting them in the design process too soon and giving their opinion overriding power is a mistake.
The success of Google clearly shows it's not a mistake, numbers don't lie, but designers are full of bullshit they can't justify.
Agree or Disagree: Twitter clients are an example of sound feedback hooking users attention (among other things), where the web was failing to do so.
Success of Google and 'design sensibilities' is not really an argument worth correlating; there are companies like Apple that master both engineering and design... tremendously successful. Furthermore, one could argue that Google Calendar is a near exact rip off of iCal, no credit to Google except putting it on the cloud and syncing it with their own software suite. I think influence is great, but goog engineers are not necessarily to credit for design and usability in this and other products.
I would say it's the goal of most web-app builders to mimic desktop apps b/c the result is a familiar environment for the end user. Software/UI design is an established practice, with many studied and proven methodologies for handling complex user interaction that has been unfamiliar to the web in former years.
That said, I believe it's inevitable that web-apps will mirror their desktop counter-parts in time (many are doing so already)... the exception being, highly-specialized web apps.
I would argue that they do have a truly innovative design. The fact that it doesn't look new and challenging doesn't preclude that. They have a design that's nuanced in thousands of ways to improve their business. Their design is reminiscient of Victorian architecture, every last detail polished off until it was perfect. Having your business fine tuned to that amount of detail is not something most companies can claim.
"Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. With split-testing, it tends to get more effective." - Eric Ries
You might as well say you can take code and with minor increments make it perfect over time.... Sounds logical, but we all know it doesn't work like that.
Sure, tuning will take you a long, long way -- but occasionally you need to break the rules to leap forward.
I would much rather say "We are sacrificing 1% conversion to take a bold new direction with our design" than to say "We are redesigning beacuse our old site looks old and that's bad."
If they're looking for interfaces that are truly better, they would do far more testing on innovative/educated directions and iterate each of those to see how good they can get. Instead you just make one version as business-helpful as possible, which may be much weaker than your true potential.
I like the idea of data, but there's only so much progress you can make with the same designs in the same mold, tested pixel by pixel.
When I started at Google Nov. '06 Doug had created some awesome Gmail mockups that really took the design and functionality above and beyond and -- having heard about how ground up Goog worked -- I was thinking those designs would be acted upon and built in the coming months and I was excited about using that Gmail.
When I left end of last year, the mockups were still being iterated on, and the only thing that had been built based on those mockups were the buttons. Gmail's just too big, as are search and ads, and UX is too disorganized and outnumbered to have any say.
And Doug Bowman's not the only one - Jeff Veen left recently too, who headed up their UX group after Google acquired Measure Map and applied the lessons learned to gAnalytics.
That doesn't mean he's a bad designer - I'm sure he's not. But Google occupies a particular place in the market ecosystem: many of its users want a UI that's clean, spartan, and utilitarian. There're undoubtably market niches for stuff that's more visually stunning (wasn't one of PG's ideas for startups "A form of search that depends upon design"), but people interested in that would be far more economically productive seeking out new markets of people that are underserved by Google's spartan design rather than trying to force something visually impressive upon Google's existing users.
Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of silliness. I'm reminded of those room makeover shows they have on TV. At the beginning, the designer tells the couple one of the colors they've chosen. The couple is aghast. "What, I can't stand magenta. No way!" Sometimes, the wife looks like she's about to cry. At the end, magenta is used and the design is breathtaking.
There is no way user testing has gotten efficient enough to beat a designer at that level of detail. Moreover, users often don't know they want something until a designer shows them they do. You can never get to those designs by testing blues and borders.
The best thing about a data-driven approach is that it gives room to be wrong. And we're proven wrong all the time: basically every meeting, there's some measured data where we go "that can't be right" - and then we either discuss ways in which we might've misinterpreted it or say "Okay, assuming this is right, then what do we do?" It sounds idiotic, but really we're (humanity in general) the idiots.
Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting podcast about people's ability/inability to express what they really mean and feel. He uses the Aeron chair as an example of a product that was despised/considered ugly but eventually embraced for it breakthrough functionality/aesthetic.
I can see how data-backed design decisions can produced locally optimized results, the "ideal" shade of blue, logo size, typography, etc.. But I wonder if on the whole, all those optimizations work together optimally, as a wholistic experience?
[edit] Gladwell's Podcast: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail230.html
So, it looks like the designer didn't know.
I'd contend that's because most designers don't optimize for performance, they optimize for aesthetic. When those two are in conflict which should win?
It sounds like Bowman thinks the latter, while Google thinks the former. As a stockholder I'm thankful that's the company's attitude.
No it isn't, if a designers ideas cannot withstand a little objective scientific testing, they aren't worth using.
> Moreover, users often don't know they want something until a designer shows them they do. You can never get to those designs by testing blues and borders.
Which is the whole point of objective testing, do the design, throw it in front of real users and see how it performs next to the original design.
I think what's really going on is that more often than not, designers want what they like rather than what works best. Engineers want what works best, and Google has an engineering culture. Form does and rightfully should take a back seat to function.
Say, which do you think is better, emacs or vim?
Even in a data-driven environment oftentimes the argument gets pushed back from "what to do" to "what to measure."
Emacs vs. Vim, Ruby vs. Python, or whatever.
And those things are quantifiable to some extent. Take a random sample of engineers, give them identical tasks to complete, and vary the editor.
I think I'm on the other side of this. In the past, I would have said that Google had the best designed interfaces on the Web. Lately, I find myself wishing there was a way to opt-out of their 'upgrades'.
Most of my complaints are about their recent attempts to improve search results by automatically 'fixing' the queries I enter, but I'm guessing the border in question is the bold blue box surrounding the Gmail message list. I hate it.
Presuming he was the one arguing for making it the way it is (visually bold but distracting and unnecessary), I would side strongly with those who wanted to actually test it on users instead of trusting his judgment.
As pointed out elsewhere in these comments, Apple represents something like the opposite prioritization of Google. The argument for "subjective" design is that it is impossible to build up a good, coherent design by testing out each aspect empirically then putting all those things together. Consider the classic Slashdot review of iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." The consideration of each aspect in isolation missed the design trade offs that made the iPod great overall.
I suppose Google misses out on that, but it's not clear that they or their users care. I do think, though, that Google has a unique approach to usability. Which is "Here's a box. Type some stuff in, and we'll figure out what to do with it." Google "search" is actually several different applications, and Google routes to the ones it thinks best suit what you typed. Chrome's single address/search bar follows this philosophy.
It's interesting to think that what distinguishes Apple and Google, more so than the product spaces they operate in, are the balance of empirical and subjective factors in their engineering cultures.
I see it like this: design-thinking tends to be top-down and borrows from fields like psychology and anthropology, while data-driven-thinking borrows from the harder empirical sciences and is based on continuous measurement.
Neither is "correct" and both can be executed to produce a great company. Apple, as you say, is on one end of the spectrum. Companies like Amazon and Google are on the other end.
It's important to understand how you're making decisions and why you've chosen that process as opposed to some other one.
It sounds like neither Google nor Doug have done that.
A visual designer friend pointed me to an Einstein quote that i think sums up the frustration of collaboration that occurs with a purely data based approach quite well:
"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination."
They've got the fast, accurate & stupid down very well. There's a lot to be said for some well thought through inaccurate & slow brilliance though too.
very very insightful.
In my last job the charter of the group of which I was a part was to "break the mould" and come up with "radical innovations" but every idea we came up with was shot down with "we've never done anything like that before".
compare that quote with the one from here: http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-fail...
>"In dictating the appearance of Google's Web pages, Mayer freely admits she makes subjective decisions. In more than a decade on the job, she has not yet codified her design instinct into a written style guide. Instead, Mayer's whims, which managers under her must make a study of, are what rule."
And, clearly-- on tiny things like shades of blue and pixel widths, just launch something. With infinite resources it'd be great to test all permutations-- but surely they have more inspiring things to try/test that might move the needle.
I am not so sure. Why not just A/B test anyway. You just might get stunning non incremental progress.
Or if that is too radical, just focus test. Or something other than just rejecting non incremental designs.
If you have a lot of information to present to a user, then good design is about presenting that information in a comprehensible way, which often involves creating a pretty spartan interface. Doing this is not easy, and requires plenty of creativity.
Yes, there can be better designs which are just as clean, but to get to the same level with a new concept would take the same amount of work and the same number of mistakes. This I also believe.
As for what I think about designers... truth is, not so much lately. In my freelance experience, working with freelance designers, they are the worst when it comes to deadlines (even very loose ones). But the thing I resent them most for is how often they just "add visual pizzazz". Rarely I see a site layout, or worse, application layout which accounts for future development or development ease or changes of any kind. What I really want is a concept which would allow me to do more, not less with my app. And unfortunately I often get one which looks great, but will break if I want to add a couple of controls or filters.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs
[edited formatting (thanks unalone)]
EDIT: That's one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes. When I was younger and making my first web sites, I thought design was all about making things pretty. Turns out, pretty has almost nothing to do with design (and, in fact most of the design I like the most is aggressively minimal and stripped away). Design's about how things flow.
(I'd also say, speaking as somebody who takes a lot of interest in design, that this makes design incredibly fun once you figure this out. It means that every page you make, even sign-up pages, are wildly different and interesting. I've made something like 6 iterations of my site's log in page, simplifying and condensing it each time, and I get a thrill out of that similar to the one that comes from making code better and more elegant. Not to speak of the notadouche sign up page, which was very very fun to design.)
One of my main problem's with Google's design isn't how plain it is, it's just that it looks half finished at times - it doesn't need more, but it doesn't look like it was well thought out.
This could very well be intentional.
Take speaking a foreign language as an example:
1) If you're a novice, a native can tell right off the bat and cuts you some serious slack.
2) Even if you speak their language at an intermediate level, a native can still tell it's not your first tongue and, depending on your demeanor, cuts you some slack.
3) You speak their language fluently and can be considered by any native speaker to have mastered their tongue. However, when you (confidently) mess up in the slightest, you can very well look quite retarded to the natives.
In Google's case, that half-finished look could be very intentional and can look a bit humble, as in "I'm sorry I haven't had time to clean up the place, but please come in and make yourself feel at home".
You can feel a bit better knowing you don't have to be constantly alert as you would around the presence of perceived perfection.
They've got millions of clients, but they have very few designers. I'd be more worried about losing the design leads. (Unless his ideas would have cost the company millions of clients, but it doesn't sound like that's the case -- if it was, they would have just fired him.)
The question of whether it "works" isn't clear-cut to me. Not a day goes by I use a Google service that I don't curse it for something stupid it does. I'm looking forward to what Bowman does next, because if it's any of the Google services I use, I'll jump ship in a heartbeat for something with good design. A lot of their services are almost without competition, because the little guys don't have the guts to stand up to Google, and the big guys who do have even worse design.
If the centered text gets a higher ROI, it'd be pretty weird to go with the left aligned instead.
Design on something like Google isn't quite as easy to measure.
A brochure site is designed to lead to a conversion, and likely to be only used by the user once. Whereas a site like Google may be used day in day out.
This effect is multiplied when you're trying to test design changes in products where users need to interact with one another (makes testing new design on only a subset of users incredibly difficult). Data-driven design in these contexts will likely just tell you to stick with what already seems to work.
At the moment, it's unclear if Google's really in the business of developing new user behaviors. They're operating a cash machine with reasonably well-understood dynamics, and will probably do pretty well just tuning it. I think this may turn out to be a strategic issue for them in the long run, but for now it seems like the answer is simple: if you're a talented visual or interaction designer, don't expect to have much fun working at Google.
Not only that, but they are masters of creating a 'design ecosystem'. Browse apple.com, then head to the apple store, its a seamless experience. This is arguably one of the competitive advantages that has helped Apple maintain it's position in the market and with consumers everywhere.
The reason Apple's been successful is that they occupy a small but passionate niche of customers that are completely underserved by Microsoft. Most users don't care about design - but the ones that do care a lot, and will pay a premium for something that pays attention to their needs. There's probably room for a similar competitor to Google, but nobody's found it yet.
Most users don't care about design? I think the number of the different Apple products sold say otherwise. A phone that anyone can pick up and use many of the features without reading a manual, thats a byproduct of brilliant design on many levels. Whether people care or not, they connect with it and are put in a position where they now have feelings for a piece of technology. When they then decide to make that purchase they very much care about design.
Microsoft products have indeed been successful, but other than the xbox (and we're talking consumer electronics here not OS's) what has been the other runaway hit they've made? The zune is a great media player, but came about after msft assembled a team and put them in a room with an ipod and told them to make something better.
The growth in sales from Apples products combined with their increasing marketshare in the desktop and mobile spaces are very indicative of consumers demanding better designed stuff. Apple's in-house iterative process is best positioned and most efficient at making products that are in line with that.
A friend of mine, now an Apple emeritus distinguished engineer, said that during the engineering redesign of the Apple UI elements for Leopard (10.5) (which ended up looking nearly the same as 10.4), the engineers would have a weekly meeting, where they'd present just a few buttons. Jobs would walk in and say "yes" or "no" and walk out. Took quite a few iterations. ;-)
(To be clear, this was the internal re-engineering effort to make the Aqua UI resolution-independent. Inside of 10.5 is a huge set of tools that accomplish that fact, but it still had to look the same at current resolutions, and also look good at higher, which we haven't seen yet. The good results is that they can deploy a whole new system-wide, resolution-independent look & feel by replacing some XML and PNG files in the Appearance internal framework, and with no code changes. I suspect we're going to see that used in 10.6 very late in the cycle so there are no leaks.)
In the beginning, Google was Ark A. Then it was Ark C. Now it's Ark B (tRatEotU - DNA)
But I have to admit, being able to precisely exactly quantify the beauty and usability of a design is irresistibly compelling to me. Especially when billions of dollars hinge on it (and you can measure them).
That's her quite distinctive style stamped across all those Google properties, and she makes no bones about it.
http://gawker.com/5169099/twitter-claims-valley-crown-by-poa...
;)
In major culture mis-matches, both parties know there is no returning anyway. I've had that experience, and I know I can never return.
In other words, if other companies with an approach to design similar to Google's don't want to hire him in the future, that's probably fine with him.
Coming across material like that when researching someone for a job would probably be a no-hire flag for me - and many others. I'm sure he's a great designer, but does a post like that expand or limit the number of future gigs he might get? You could say "he wouldn't want to work at places like that anyway", but I'd rather have that decision left to me rather than a lack of response when I'm looking for work.
Offering this in the spirit of advice. I've been hiring people in the valley for 10+ years. I used dejanews to screen applicants prior to google... today yes we will read your tweets, find your blog, and skim it all to get a sense of who you are. Be thoughtful about what you post.
You're talking about a guy who talks at numerous conferences every year (or at least did), who designed Blogger templates before being employed by Google, who designed Webmonkey, Wired, etc. (http://stopdesign.com/about)
Besides, he was simply pointing out that this was a complete mismatch for him and I can understand his "frustration", given the fact that he was supposed to be a UI Lead at Google. He wasn't hired to be some low-level pixel pusher.
Who cares about some middle manager's opinion?
Offering this in the spirit of advice. I've been hiring people in the valley for 10+ years. I used dejanews to screen applicants prior to google... today yes we will read your tweets, find your blog, and skim it all to get a sense of who you are. Be thoughtful about what you post.
It sounds like you are looking for people who will shut up and churn out mediocre code for 8 hours a day. There's certainly a market for that, but I doubt the author of this article is interested.
If I write a blog post about how much I hate cleaning up toxic waste, that will limit my opportunities for employment cleaning up toxic waste. But who cares, I would never do that anyway.
Even more so for a senior guy like that. He's leaving one hot company to go work at another - he can talk about the great opportunity at Twitter. He doesn't need to gripe about the job he's leaving.
His post spawned a bunch of mildly unfavorable press, which is currently #1 on Techmeme. Bad form.
You keep saying this. Perhaps you'd like to explain why.
I'm first developer then designer and I do believe that one product should constantly be developed in bought direction. In the case of Google they have excellent query search result but can do much much better visual experience. I'm not talking about rebuilding everything but sometimes one pixel can make great difference.