Google's "designer drain" | Hacker News Reader

Google's "designer drain"

adamhowell.org

56 pointsadamhowell28 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How do you get test driven design to find global maxima? Or at least obscure but large local maxima? It seems that if you start with "blah design" and iterate, you'll get the best "blah design" possible. Thoughts?

Henry Ford said something along the lines of "people just wanting a faster horse".

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.

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.

For the record, I did mainly markup, CSS & JS for Google Sites and some prototyping for Gmail and the like. But I usually use designer instead of UX engineer or Front-end designer/developer for expediancy and plus I'd hate to sound like an affected douche.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

It doesn't matter if 1/10 left or all left, it matters that some very prominent designers, who were supposed to be leading the user interface design at Google, left. They were all very accomplished and well-known.

The departure of Jeff Veen and Doug Bowman is fairly significant - they are big names in the UI/UX design field and played major roles in the design of Google Analytics and Gmail/Google Calendar, respectively.

If Doug Bowman says the culture at Google sucks for designers they are going to have a hard time recruiting great designers - his word has a lot of weight in the design world.

>> "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.

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.

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 ?

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.

Lowest common denominator? Publishers want users to click. Google wants users to click. Advertisers want (good) users to click.

Who loses here, besides the person who thinks yellow is "bad design?" Your customers have the final say, not the designer.

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

It's horrible to read.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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