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> "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 ha

by jeresig 18y ago

> "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 world to tackle." That's pretty damning. Google has always had a very developer-centric environment - and backing up design decisions with data definitely seems like a logical extension of that. > "I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong." It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. It seems like it's far too safe for them to go with what they know and what's been tested rather than something new and challenging. A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.

dejb 18y ago
> "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.
- axod 18y ago
  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.
  - teej 18y ago
    It's impractical for most businesses, but when you're at Google scale, a 0.1% difference in conversion can be huge.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    I guess it depends on if you trust the majority making the right decision. When you're running a business and the decision is whether or not to convert, trusting the majority is the only decision. If others see it as mediocrity, so be it.
  - dminor 18y ago
    I think the point he's making isn't about the correct way to choose a shade of blue, it's that real design work encompasses far more than picking colors.
    - jfarmer 18y ago
      That's true. Design is not about shades of color and pixel widths. But it also sounds like he resists having his designs put through the ringer of empirical analysis.
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    It's Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods. Which would you rather be? Both answers are fine, of course, the important thing is the "why."
  - snprbob86 18y ago
    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.
- pxlpshr 18y ago
  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 just being sarcastic, my opinion still applies. :)
  - dejb 18y ago
    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.
    - pxlpshr 18y ago
      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.
teej 18y ago
> It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. I would argue that they do have a truly innovative design. The fact that it doesn't look new and challenging doesn't preclude that. They have a design that's nuanced in thousands of ways to improve their business. Their design is reminiscient of Victorian architecture, every last detail polished off until it was perfect. Having your business fine tuned to that amount of detail is not something most companies can claim. "Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. With split-testing, it tends to get more effective." - Eric Ries
- jwilliams 18y ago
  True -- but design isn't a science... Or it's only part-science anyway... You might as well say you can take code and with minor increments make it perfect over time.... Sounds logical, but we all know it doesn't work like that. Sure, tuning will take you a long, long way -- but occasionally you need to break the rules to leap forward.
  - teej 18y ago
    I don't disagree that sometimes you need to make radical changes to make true progress. But I think those radical changes need to be put through the same testing that small changes are put through. I would much rather say "We are sacrificing 1% conversion to take a bold new direction with our design" than to say "We are redesigning beacuse our old site looks old and that's bad."
- Keyframe 18y ago
  I think you are confusing functionality with design - even though two are closely related. Google is a landmark in both functionality and design - but former was the one that hauled latter onto the scene. IMO google has had one of the worst designs/branding ever before gmail era, which is in stark contrast with it's peak in functionality. This makes it a unique blend that stands out.
- horatio 18y ago
  I honestly think a lot of their 3px, 4px, or 5px decisions are actually an exercise of finding local maxima for their current design. If they're looking for interfaces that are truly better, they would do far more testing on innovative/educated directions and iterate each of those to see how good they can get. Instead you just make one version as business-helpful as possible, which may be much weaker than your true potential. I like the idea of data, but there's only so much progress you can make with the same designs in the same mold, tested pixel by pixel.
adamhowell 18y ago
> 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 about using that Gmail. When I left end of last year, the mockups were still being iterated on, and the only thing that had been built based on those mockups were the buttons. Gmail's just too big, as are search and ads, and UX is too disorganized and outnumbered to have any say.
- reconbot 18y ago
  Are any of those mockups public? I love seeing good design ideas.
  - adamhowell 18y ago
    No, unfortunately, not that I know of.
- alabut 18y ago
  > 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.
nostrademons 18y ago
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's clean, spartan, and utilitarian. There're undoubtably market niches for stuff that's more visually stunning (wasn't one of PG's ideas for startups "A form of search that depends upon design"), but people interested in that would be far more economically productive seeking out new markets of people that are underserved by Google's spartan design rather than trying to force something visually impressive upon Google's existing users.
- ellyagg 18y ago
  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 silliness. I'm reminded of those room makeover shows they have on TV. At the beginning, the designer tells the couple one of the colors they've chosen. The couple is aghast. "What, I can't stand magenta. No way!" Sometimes, the wife looks like she's about to cry. At the end, magenta is used and the design is breathtaking. There is no way user testing has gotten efficient enough to beat a designer at that level of detail. 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.
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    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?
    - simonk 18y ago
      You just spent three days of a teams time over what the designer already knew.
nkurz 18y ago
> It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. I think I'm on the other side of this. In the past, I would have said that Google had the best designed interfaces on the Web. Lately, I find myself wishing there was a way to opt-out of their 'upgrades'. Most of my complaints are about their recent attempts to improve search results by automatically 'fixing' the queries I enter, but I'm guessing the border in question is the bold blue box surrounding the Gmail message list. I hate it. Presuming he was the one arguing for making it the way it is (visually bold but distracting and unnecessary), I would side strongly with those who wanted to actually test it on users instead of trusting his judgment.
access_denied 18y ago
But therein lies a big danger. Design, why a given design works better, has _also_ to do with the culture and the taste of the many. The taste here not so much in the PG sense, but more in what people are used to. Similar like how the many think PCs cause a lot of problems because Windows has a lot of instabilities (Please, just trying to make a point. You know what I mean, that's enough.). This taste will change with the time, what will Google have as a response? Or: when will PG write of the death of Google's design?

by jeresig 18y ago

dejb 18y ago

> "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.

axod 18y ago
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.
- teej 18y ago
  It's impractical for most businesses, but when you're at Google scale, a 0.1% difference in conversion can be huge.
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  I guess it depends on if you trust the majority making the right decision. When you're running a business and the decision is whether or not to convert, trusting the majority is the only decision. If others see it as mediocrity, so be it.
- dminor 18y ago
  I think the point he's making isn't about the correct way to choose a shade of blue, it's that real design work encompasses far more than picking colors.
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    That's true. Design is not about shades of color and pixel widths. But it also sounds like he resists having his designs put through the ringer of empirical analysis.
- jfarmer 18y ago
  It's Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods. Which would you rather be? Both answers are fine, of course, the important thing is the "why."
- snprbob86 18y ago
  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.
pxlpshr 18y ago
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 just being sarcastic, my opinion still applies. :)
- dejb 18y ago
  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.
  - pxlpshr 18y ago
    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.

teej 18y ago

> It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. I would argue that they do have a truly innovative design. The fact that it doesn't look new and challenging doesn't preclude that. They have a design that's nuanced in thousands of ways to improve their business. Their design is reminiscient of Victorian architecture, every last detail polished off until it was perfect. Having your business fine tuned to that amount of detail is not something most companies can claim. "Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. With split-testing, it tends to get more effective." - Eric Ries

jwilliams 18y ago
True -- but design isn't a science... Or it's only part-science anyway... You might as well say you can take code and with minor increments make it perfect over time.... Sounds logical, but we all know it doesn't work like that. Sure, tuning will take you a long, long way -- but occasionally you need to break the rules to leap forward.
- teej 18y ago
  I don't disagree that sometimes you need to make radical changes to make true progress. But I think those radical changes need to be put through the same testing that small changes are put through. I would much rather say "We are sacrificing 1% conversion to take a bold new direction with our design" than to say "We are redesigning beacuse our old site looks old and that's bad."
Keyframe 18y ago
I think you are confusing functionality with design - even though two are closely related. Google is a landmark in both functionality and design - but former was the one that hauled latter onto the scene. IMO google has had one of the worst designs/branding ever before gmail era, which is in stark contrast with it's peak in functionality. This makes it a unique blend that stands out.
horatio 18y ago
I honestly think a lot of their 3px, 4px, or 5px decisions are actually an exercise of finding local maxima for their current design. If they're looking for interfaces that are truly better, they would do far more testing on innovative/educated directions and iterate each of those to see how good they can get. Instead you just make one version as business-helpful as possible, which may be much weaker than your true potential. I like the idea of data, but there's only so much progress you can make with the same designs in the same mold, tested pixel by pixel.

adamhowell 18y ago

> 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 about using that Gmail. When I left end of last year, the mockups were still being iterated on, and the only thing that had been built based on those mockups were the buttons. Gmail's just too big, as are search and ads, and UX is too disorganized and outnumbered to have any say.

reconbot 18y ago
Are any of those mockups public? I love seeing good design ideas.
- adamhowell 18y ago
  No, unfortunately, not that I know of.
alabut 18y ago
> 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.

nostrademons 18y ago

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's clean, spartan, and utilitarian. There're undoubtably market niches for stuff that's more visually stunning (wasn't one of PG's ideas for startups "A form of search that depends upon design"), but people interested in that would be far more economically productive seeking out new markets of people that are underserved by Google's spartan design rather than trying to force something visually impressive upon Google's existing users.

ellyagg 18y ago
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 silliness. I'm reminded of those room makeover shows they have on TV. At the beginning, the designer tells the couple one of the colors they've chosen. The couple is aghast. "What, I can't stand magenta. No way!" Sometimes, the wife looks like she's about to cry. At the end, magenta is used and the design is breathtaking. There is no way user testing has gotten efficient enough to beat a designer at that level of detail. 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.
- jfarmer 18y ago
  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?
  - simonk 18y ago
    You just spent three days of a teams time over what the designer already knew.

nkurz 18y ago

> It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. I think I'm on the other side of this. In the past, I would have said that Google had the best designed interfaces on the Web. Lately, I find myself wishing there was a way to opt-out of their 'upgrades'. Most of my complaints are about their recent attempts to improve search results by automatically 'fixing' the queries I enter, but I'm guessing the border in question is the bold blue box surrounding the Gmail message list. I hate it. Presuming he was the one arguing for making it the way it is (visually bold but distracting and unnecessary), I would side strongly with those who wanted to actually test it on users instead of trusting his judgment.

access_denied 18y ago

But therein lies a big danger. Design, why a given design works better, has _also_ to do with the culture and the taste of the many. The taste here not so much in the PG sense, but more in what people are used to. Similar like how the many think PCs cause a lot of problems because Windows has a lot of instabilities (Please, just trying to make a point. You know what I mean, that's enough.). This taste will change with the time, what will Google have as a response? Or: when will PG write of the death of Google's design?