I was pointed to a very interesting blog post by a designer who quit his job at Google.
Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
The whole point of experimenting is that you can make daring decisions. Try it, measure it, and you'll know if it works. E.g. when Amazon decided to launch product recommendations: the management was against it. They were afraid that customers might be distracted from checking out. Luckily for Amazon subjective opinions were not the ultimate decision factor.
On the other hand, if you have a product that's used by many millions every day you might need to limit the freedom of experiments. It's not the fault of the data driven decision process but rather the fact that millions of users can get very annoyed if you are constantly changing the design completely.
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.
I’m surprised they tested so many shades of blue. Maybe the engineers were trying to resolve some dispute between designers? I wouldn't be surprised if the data showed that it doesn't matter which shade you choose. And maybe the conclusion was not to bother too much about such design details in the future? There’s a lot to be learned from such experiments even if there is no clear winner. If you have a framework setup to run such an experiment quickly, why not do it? Which designer wouldn't like to know that the new design is helping the company succeed?
The 3 vs 5px example sounds odd to me. 5 is 70% bigger than 3. How’s that minuscule? Google’s design decisions affect millions. I’m very glad that they carefully check any changes they make.
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Firstly, this is a designer expressing their personal preference to a working environment.
ReplyDeleteA particular designer finds the Google process stifling, that's an opinion, not a "war on data driven reasoning". Just because they don't enjoy working with that kind of process does not mean a) the process is invalid or b) the design is wrong. Further to this your title"design vs reason" is framing this whole discussion as black or white, or rather ironically, A vs B. I'm sure you understand it's simply not like this?
Quotes such as "Which designer wouldn't like to know that the new design is helping the company succeed?" are an overly simplistic strawman attack. Where did anyone say a designer would rather be in the dark, to have no supporting data?
I honestly don't see why people have made such a big deal out of his departure from Google, nor his reasoning. Those who've been most argumentative about it are either engineers/data analysis types who see his comments as "i'm a designer, i'm right, i don't need no data!" while classical designers feel their power is being threatened. Both groups are being overly defensive because they feel their "art" is being threatened.
If you want to discuss it in the context of a particular designer and company, fine, but please don't apply sweeping strokes of "reason" to everything. Google is not a good yardstick for the rest of the internet.