All you designers out there , here ’s a dilemma , courtesy Google : When it comes to determining the direction of a company , just how much innovation ascendance should one cede to the consumer ?
At Google , data is king . Charts , focus groups and surd data determine what live on into the company ’s client - facing products and services , and that was the way out . At least , that was the issue for former Googler Douglas Bowman .
Bowman , now at Twitter , recently wrote on his personal that , put but , Google isnot favorable to designers .
When he would come up with a design decision , no matter how moment , he was asked to back it up with information . Before he could decide whether a line on a Web Thomas Nelson Page should be three , four or five pixels wide , for case , he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web . dissimilar grouping of drug user would see dissimilar versions , and their clicking behavior , or the amount of time they spent on a Thomas Nelson Page , would help pluck a winner . “ Data eventually becomes a crutch for every determination , paralyzing the company and prevent it from stimulate any venturous design decisions , ” Bowman said .
Google , for its part , is “ unapologetic ” about the decision to have little 1 ’s and 0 ’s back up all major pattern conclusion . “ We let the math and the datum order how thing look and palpate , ” said Marissa Mayer , Google ’s frailty president of search products and user experience .
As a blogger and self - describe devoid mind , I ’m initially inclined to side with Bowman a spot on this one . When a company becomes wholly pendant on datum and client feedback to drive the party forward there is , by the nature of such an approach , a tendency to take few risk of exposure . On the other hand , Google is Skynet made material , and it sits high-pitched atop a pile of money , great power and influence precisely because of its try out data - drive advance to product design .
And then there are companies like Apple , which no doubt focus trial and whatnot , but for the most part have made design and product determination establish on sheer leaps and tweak of existing technical school that user did n’t even bonk they wanted . Alternatively , the ship’s company has even left out features that the Net ’s more vocal habitant ( read : we geeks ) deem completely necessary for the speech sound ’s achiever . Oh , and they ’re big fans of that “ secrecy ” thing too .
“ Customers sometimes do not have sex what they need , ” said John Seely Brown , the co - chairwoman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation , in an consultation with the NYT . “ It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need . ”
I ’d be interested to hear what artistry director , graphic designers and the Google Analytics sect have to say about this , because it ’s emphatically sounding like a case - by - case argument , give the succeeder of both data- and design - driven representative advert above . At Twitter , where Bowman now mirthfully resides , design changes are often culled from user ’s tweets . How incestuous ! But it led to Twitter trend and lookup being integrated into my write up , so there . [ New York Times ]
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