Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google | Hacker News Reader

Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google

nytimes.com

25 pointstokenadult11 comments

“It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need.”

Right but that's not what Google is doing, they listen to what users do. This is not the same.

I don't think Bowman understands the difference between design and art.

As Nate Silver says, predictability = designability. If you can predict which elements will elicit a certain reaction from a user, then you can design an experience to elicit that reaction. Data isn't optional in design, it's the sine qua non. It's not a coincidence that design is a synonym for fate; without data design doesn't exist.

That was my exact thought as soon as I read that line. At the same time though, it is important for google to realize that a/b[/c/d] testing referred to in the article will only get you to local maximums (as much as it can be said that designs catering to users can have optimal results) and to get a real leap more significant changes would have to be made.

Obviously testing major design changes with any of their core products is going to take alot more than a designer or two saying this or that design is better. I'd imagine the design process for smaller and new projects is much more open to changes on a designer's whim.

"Already his team has unveiled a major design overhaul. On the margin of users’ pages they added a search box and a list of “trending topics,” subjects that are most popular with tweeters at a given time."

seriously? the placement of that search box and trending list really set the world on fire. i'm not really hating on twitter, but common - a search box and a list of data on the right margin? they should have mentioned the saved searches. better yet, bowman should have landed with twitterrific, twhirl or tweetie.

In fact, Bowman had very little if anything to do with this latest redesign. This design had been around for months in beta testing already.

Google asks its employees to spend 20 percent of their work time to basically design stuff that doesn't have to be accounted for by any data. I assume that they get a steady input of raw design that way, and that they are not dangerously impoverished there, or in danger to become so.

I didn't see any examples of a case where design was "held back by a tyranny of data" in the article. Maybe a data-centric view is cumbersome, but Google clearly feels strongly that it's worth the price.

Designers should be free to create something innovative, but I see no problem with judging the results with real metrics.

Look, if the argument is that Google products are poorly designed and so the user experience isn't as good as it could be if you had a "real designer", then take Yahoo BOSS and build your own damn engine with a nice design.

Well Cooliris is rather designed and it is a hell of a service many million times better than google images for instance.

But of course google is in the data business they are not in the design business so you can't really blame them.

Google's reliance on data for everything sounds like they should watch out for overfitting (as in machine learning). Presumably, they're doing so, but it's an interesting thought.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com