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Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

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Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#71

Post by snprbob86 »

axod wrote: post #12
dejb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. " Actually the evolutionist in me thinks this is pretty cool but I can still understand why a designer would want to quit.

I guess it depends on if you trust the majority making the right decision. I think often that just leads to mediocracy. 41 shades does seem a bit of a gimmick. I doubt it really matters that much, or that most people can even tell the difference.

If you can test A and B, you'd test 2 colors. Or maybe 3. But when you have to test many things (not just shades of blue) and you run tests of A, B, C, D, and so on, all the time... I'm sure they could test HUNDREDS of shades if blue just as easily as they can test 3.

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#72

Post by alabut »

adamhowell wrote: post #16
jeresig wrote: post #4

> "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. There are more exciting design problems in this…

> A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years. When I started at Google Nov. '06 Doug had created some awesome Gmail mockups that really took the design and functionality above and beyond and -- having heard about how ground up Goog worked -- I was thinking those designs would be acted upon and built in the coming months and I was excited abo…

> A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.

And Doug Bowman's not the only one - Jeff Veen left recently too, who headed up their UX group after Google acquired Measure Map and applied the lessons learned to gAnalytics.

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#73

Post by dejb »

pxlpshr wrote: post #62
dejb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. " Actually the evolutionist in me thinks this is pretty cool but I can still understand why a designer would want to quit.

From a designer's perspective, this is an example of engineers over-thinking a problem in a space they don't belong. It's absolutely stupid and a complete waste of time for the simple reason that electronic color is not consistent. A majority of the users will see a different shade of blue depending on their display settings. A very small percentage of the population will see the color that's intended. And if he's ju…

This lack of consistent colour presentation is actually an advantage for Google's approach over the designed based one. Their approach is optimising across the population of 'end colour presentations'. Even if 50% of users happened to see it shades of aqua then the best 'aqua' presentation would also be incorporated into the result with a 50% weighting. A designer would find it very difficult to weight all the of presentations proportionately even if he knew about them whereas Google's method doesn't even need to know about the variations. Let's face it you never really know what peoples internal representations of colours are.

Of course this type of testing only works where you can measure the results and the number of options to be tested are low compared with the number of tests. If you look at the whole layout of a page then then there are just too many dimensions for this type of testing to be practical. A designer could perhaps argue that changing the background colour, the border colour and using a bigger red button would be the best option. A designer could also argue that they are optimising for 'overall experience' rather than some measurable metric like clicks.

I think this all goes to show why both designers and 'measurement geeks' need to work together on these things.

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#75

Post by [deleted] »

cdibona wrote: post #49
plinkplonk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" but large applications/sites with so many users are not the place to test it." I am not so sure. Why not just A/B test anyway. You just might get stunning non incremental progress. Or if that is too radical, just focus test. Or something other than just rejecting non incremental designs.

We actually do a/b testing. I don't work with the ui folks much, but we're always running tests like this. It's why you sometimes see some design/functionality feature appear for like one search and then poof you don't see for a while if at all.

[deleted]

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#76

Post by simonk »

jfarmer wrote: post #66
ellyagg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere does his post imply that the reason he's leaving is because his design aesthetic clashes with Google's desire for "clean, spartan, and utilitarian." It's perfectly possible to meet those goals and not be ugly, like, e.g., iGoogle and Gmail are. I consider most of Apple's designs to be "clean, spartan, and utilitarian". Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of sillin…

Why is that silly? For Google it takes no time to implement and, because of their traffic, no time to test. What's the downside?

You just spent three days of a teams time over what the designer already knew.

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#78

Post by gb »

twoz wrote: post #61
gb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean and creative aren't mutually exclusive though. It's perhaps too obvious an example, but Apple's design is on the whole pretty clean - and to my eyes at least looks like a lot more care was given to it. One of my main problem's with Google's design isn't how plain it is, it's just that it looks half finished at times - it doesn't need more, but it doesn't look like it was well thought out.

One of my main problems with Google's design isn't how plain it is, it's just that it looks half finished at times - it doesn't need more, but it doesn't look like it was well thought out. This could very well be intentional. Take speaking a foreign language as an example: 1) If you're a novice, a native can tell right off the bat and cuts you some serious slack. 2) Even if you speak their language at an intermediate…

That's an interesting way of looking at it, not something that would have occurred to me at all.

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#79

Post by pxlpshr »

dejb wrote: post #73
pxlpshr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a designer's perspective, this is an example of engineers over-thinking a problem in a space they don't belong. It's absolutely stupid and a complete waste of time for the simple reason that electronic color is not consistent. A majority of the users will see a different shade of blue depending on their display settings. A very small percentage of the population will see the color that's intended. And if he's ju…

This lack of consistent colour presentation is actually an advantage for Google's approach over the designed based one. Their approach is optimising across the population of 'end colour presentations'. Even if 50% of users happened to see it shades of aqua then the best 'aqua' presentation would also be incorporated into the result with a 50% weighting. A designer would find it very difficult to weight all the of pre…

You make good points that I partially agree with, however I still don't believe this is optimal for a few reasons.

End-user design is about creating a usable experience and often deriving an emotion to make them want to do it again, a process that relies on color combinations, layout, typography, etc. -- the complete package. I'm less attached to GOOG webapps because they lack subtle things such as sound feedback. I've found sound to be critical in software usability, far more important than very minor color discrepancies. That is, when software goes outside of very basic operations, and requires more attention from the end-user.

(Fighting about the shade of blue makes me puke in my mouth at the thought of such a corporate cliche).

Furthermore, this type of color testing would need to be extended to cover cultural differences to be truly effective. Colors will trigger completely different responses in China, Japan, France, etc, often the exact opposite of American counterparts.

Honestly, I think the engineers have a place AFTER a design has been released and there is data to mine and analyze that takes into account the entire product presentation as a whole. Interjecting them in the design process too soon and giving their opinion overriding power is a mistake. It's akin to slapping memcache on your back-end before you've done an ounce of optimization on your queries.

Re: Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google

#80

Post by gnaritas »

ellyagg wrote: post #47
nostrademons wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like he's a poor fit for Google. The data-driven decision making process really is central to Google (at least in Search; I dunno how it is in other departments), and if you're working at cross-purposes with that, the culture will and should reject you. That doesn't mean he's a bad designer - I'm sure he's not. But Google occupies a particular place in the market ecosystem: many of its users want a UI that'…

Nowhere does his post imply that the reason he's leaving is because his design aesthetic clashes with Google's desire for "clean, spartan, and utilitarian." It's perfectly possible to meet those goals and not be ugly, like, e.g., iGoogle and Gmail are. I consider most of Apple's designs to be "clean, spartan, and utilitarian". Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of sillin…

> Requiring user testing for shades of blue and thicknesses of border is the height of silliness.

No it isn't, if a designers ideas cannot withstand a little objective scientific testing, they aren't worth using.

> Moreover, users often don't know they want something until a designer shows them they do. You can never get to those designs by testing blues and borders.

Which is the whole point of objective testing, do the design, throw it in front of real users and see how it performs next to the original design.

I think what's really going on is that more often than not, designers want what they like rather than what works best. Engineers want what works best, and Google has an engineering culture. Form does and rightfully should take a back seat to function.

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