Google Defends Its Design Philosophy

In an interview on TechRadar UK, Google’s director of user experience goes a long way toward responding to claims earlier this year that the company’s design team is too reliant on data.

“Data informs decision-making but it’s less useful for conceiving and building conceptually new directions,” explains Irene Au. “It’s most useful for optimising and refining an established concept.”

Au leads a 200-person user experience team that often gets involved in new projects long after the design has started. She tells TechRadar that projects are typically started by engineers, and a developer toolkit lets the engineers “get 70 to 80 per cent of the way there without having a designer involved.”

Au says Google has to be particularly careful with design because of the potential impacts on the company’s bottom line.

“Search is such a fragile interface. It’s humbling to see how the slightest changes in design, just pixel-level changes or barely perceptible changes to colours, can have such a dramatic impact on usage and revenue.”

Well-known designer Doug Bowman left Google earlier this year and fired a parting shot on the way out, saying that the company was too reliant on data to drive its design decisions.

Related Topics: Google: User Interface


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus.

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