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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

> It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time.

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

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I honestly think a lot of their 3px, 4px, or 5px decisions are actually an exercise of finding local maxima for their current design.

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.

I think you are confusing functionality with design - even though two are closely related. Google is a landmark in both functionality and design - but former was the one that hauled latter onto the scene. IMO google has had one of the worst designs/branding ever before gmail era, which is in stark contrast with it's peak in functionality. This makes it a unique blend that stands out.

True -- but design isn't a science... Or it's only part-science anyway...

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 don't disagree that sometimes you need to make radical changes to make true progress. But I think those radical changes need to be put through the same testing that small changes are put through.

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."

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