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Because good looks don't necessarily equate to good performance. They optimize for conversion, not beauty, and make an ass-load more money because of it. That's how it should be done.
I agree with you, but it is still possible the they are only optimizing within a local minimum (ala Jason Cohen's latest blog post - http://blog.asmartbear.com/local-minimum.html ).
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You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. You can just tweak the details, in the turd-polishing sense. That being said, being ugly can of course be profitable. If you want to signal that you are cheap, for example, the ugliness helps. Just look at the difference between, say, Walmart and an Apple store. So maybe Google wants to look cheap - but I for one wish they didn't.
> You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. That's just crap. You can test anything, including entirely different versions of an app. The idea that you can't test good design is what designers tell themselves to justify their operating on gut feeling and pulling opinions out of their asses. There isn't anything a user does that you can't come up with a way to test, designers are just afra…
You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test.
And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps. It is just as in language: you can test two different novels, for example, but pretty much all the "intermediate novels" you can think of just don't make any sense.
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I submit to you as an example Chrome, which while technically sound has not exactly caught fire, despite Google's ability to promote it from the Google page.
by what metric do you argue that it has not caught fire in ways that are remotely possible based on past experience with browser market share?
On our web sites Chrome has gained no share in the last six months, while Safari (due to iPhone's increased share) has surpassed FireFox.
This recent report, http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20001546-264.html, actually gives Chrome 6.1%.
I'm just saying given the engineering resources dedicated to it, and the unparalleled promotion resource available, it could do much better.
Personally, I use Chrome, but I object to the product management decision not to offer a dedicated multi search box like FF and IE. I think this was an engineering driven decision because the omnibox is so [fill in your favorite positive adjective].
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> You can't really optimize, in the A/B-testing sense, an entire design. That's just crap. You can test anything, including entirely different versions of an app. The idea that you can't test good design is what designers tell themselves to justify their operating on gut feeling and pulling opinions out of their asses. There isn't anything a user does that you can't come up with a way to test, designers are just afra…
It may be crap, undemocratic, pulled out of behinds, and egotistic. It's still true though. You can only test a very, very limited number of designs, out of all the pretty much infinitely many possible ones. Someone still has to come up with the designs to test. And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps. It is just as in language: you can test two differe…
Yet it's still testable. There isn't anything you can't test somehow and there isn't any design any designer could come up with that can't benefit from incremental improvement as a result of testing.
> And it is very unlikely that you can go from one design to a better one in incremental, A/B-tested steps.
That's your own strawman, no one says you have to. Test radically different designs against each other, testing will still declare a winner and that winner can be incrementally improved by further testing.