Ex-Googler: Google Depends Too Much On Data Over Instinct For Design

Does Google depend too much on data over design instinct? Yes, says former Googler Douglas Bowman, who posted a goodbye note to the company on his last day there today. From his post:

Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? ….

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Postscript from Matt: For those who may not know, Doug Bowman is a star in the web design world. You’ve probably seen a lot of his work without realizing it — he created several of the most popular Blogger templates after Google bought the popular blogging platform software, and led the redesign of Blogger itself, too. He also helped design/develop Google Calendar, among other Google products.

Related Topics: Google: Employees | Google: User Interface

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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Having been in front of creating teams in the past I can see why the width of a border in a design at Google would be an important issue.

First of all lets take into account that Google IS Data and interface, there isn’t a lot of place for elaborated graphics, and here isn’t a lot to play with, so elements like table borders have a huge impact on the general feel of the design.

Take the following example:
Example 1
http://www.pedrosttau.com/fat-border.png
Example 2
http://www.pedrosttau.com/thin-border.png

On the first example a single increase in the border width of a table changes the entire design completely, focusing the users attention on that particular table.

On the example 2 we have the current Analytics design, that also tries to cache the users attention to that specific table, but by simply using a different light background on that very same table.

So these small details play a crucial role on the usability of Googles Applications.

I am very surprised that an experienced designer like Doublas would expect things to be different.