“Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google”
“Douglas Bowman left his position as top visual designer at Google and said that designs there lived or died by data on consumer responses. He now is creative director at Twitter.”
“CAN a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want? These questions surfaced recently when Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google.”
“Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.”
Source: NY Times / Article by MIGUEL HELFT, Published: May 9, 2009
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