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.