Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

Design, for me, is about evoking interesting stories. Data is an excellent tool for honing those stories but data alone isn't that compelling. Much of Google's success has been reliant on utilitarian pages that are designed to redirect users to other places - functionality which often calls for very subtle design treatments. The frustrations i've felt with their user experience is that frequently the details are smart but they miss the big elements connecting their tools into a coherent story. Ever use gmail with igoogle? or attempt to share your google reader with a friend who isn't already in your addressbook? these disconnects eventually add up & it sounds like they lack a system for coherently addressing the gestalt of their overall user experience.

A visual designer friend pointed me to an Einstein quote that i think sums up the frustration of collaboration that occurs with a purely data based approach quite well:

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination."

They've got the fast, accurate & stupid down very well. There's a lot to be said for some well thought through inaccurate & slow brilliance though too.

This doesn't seem so much a trashing to me, as pointing out a poor fit.

In other words, if other companies with an approach to design similar to Google's don't want to hire him in the future, that's probably fine with him.

"The biggest advantage a startup has is no legacy"

very very insightful.

In my last job the charter of the group of which I was a part was to "break the mould" and come up with "radical innovations" but every idea we came up with was shot down with "we've never done anything like that before".

Where do you see yourself in this dichotomy of "measure everything" versus "subjective considerations are important, too"?

As pointed out elsewhere in these comments, Apple represents something like the opposite prioritization of Google. The argument for "subjective" design is that it is impossible to build up a good, coherent design by testing out each aspect empirically then putting all those things together. Consider the classic Slashdot review of iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." The consideration of each aspect in isolation missed the design trade offs that made the iPod great overall.

I suppose Google misses out on that, but it's not clear that they or their users care. I do think, though, that Google has a unique approach to usability. Which is "Here's a box. Type some stuff in, and we'll figure out what to do with it." Google "search" is actually several different applications, and Google routes to the ones it thinks best suit what you typed. Chrome's single address/search bar follows this philosophy.

It's interesting to think that what distinguishes Apple and Google, more so than the product spaces they operate in, are the balance of empirical and subjective factors in their engineering cultures.

Trashing may be too strong a word, granted. But it's making public unflattering internal details about a company that employed him. I would be personally irritated if I was this guy's manager.

Coming across material like that when researching someone for a job would probably be a no-hire flag for me - and many others. I'm sure he's a great designer, but does a post like that expand or limit the number of future gigs he might get? You could say "he wouldn't want to work at places like that anyway", but I'd rather have that decision left to me rather than a lack of response when I'm looking for work.

Offering this in the spirit of advice. I've been hiring people in the valley for 10+ years. I used dejanews to screen applicants prior to google... today yes we will read your tweets, find your blog, and skim it all to get a sense of who you are. Be thoughtful about what you post.