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>> "Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better." That surely is an overkill. Why

>> "Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better." That surely is an overkill. Why do they have to decide between 41 shade of just blue? Instead they could have had a hackday kind of event and asked the designers to come up with his/her own designs based on a basic layout and then combine the best features (and colors maybe) of each design.

sgk284 18y ago
Because when they do that, they get burned badly. For instance, when I was working there Larry Page said that they had never used yellow as the background color for ads becsuse it reminded them of "piss". This decision lasted a a long time until they did a whole bunch of A/B testing. Yellow turned out to increase click throughs significantly (can't post percentage, but well into double digits). So now they back tracked on their original decision which was based on opinion and instead use the one that actually has good data behind it and wound up making them millions upon millions more. Sometimes they'll restrain colors to stay within a theme knowng that the best they'll get is a local maxima, but when you've got the number of users that Google does, it makes sense to try 41 shades of blue, because you'll sometimes find that just a handful significantly outperform the others, and the probability of you having picked them as a designer with no testing or data is pretty small. Designers hate how Google does things, but the results speak for themself... The methods used work really well.
- johndoe 18y ago
  But. If they were successful and made money without having to use pissy yellow color, did they truly need to switch to it to cater to the lowest common denominator ? Are the dumbasses who clicked more when the color was of piss worth it ? do you truly need users that act like animals, more on impulses than on thought ? Should you cater to the lowest common denominator and be the Microsoft of the web, or try to do the Best Thing and have a smaller market share but of much higher taste and disposable income, aka the Apple ?
  - prospero 18y ago
    If your goal is to have people click on your ads, what other denominator is there than the click-through percentage? Google is a middleman for advertising, it's not for them to judge whether their viewers are worthy of clicking on their ads. And do you really think there's a socio-economic divide along the lines of blue vs. yellow text ads? Because that's pretty ridiculous.
  - jfarmer 18y ago
    Lowest common denominator? Publishers want users to click. Google wants users to click. Advertisers want (good) users to click. Who loses here, besides the person who thinks yellow is "bad design?" Your customers have the final say, not the designer.

sgk284 18y ago

Because when they do that, they get burned badly. For instance, when I was working there Larry Page said that they had never used yellow as the background color for ads becsuse it reminded them of "piss". This decision lasted a a long time until they did a whole bunch of A/B testing. Yellow turned out to increase click throughs significantly (can't post percentage, but well into double digits). So now they back tracked on their original decision which was based on opinion and instead use the one that actually has good data behind it and wound up making them millions upon millions more. Sometimes they'll restrain colors to stay within a theme knowng that the best they'll get is a local maxima, but when you've got the number of users that Google does, it makes sense to try 41 shades of blue, because you'll sometimes find that just a handful significantly outperform the others, and the probability of you having picked them as a designer with no testing or data is pretty small. Designers hate how Google does things, but the results speak for themself... The methods used work really well.

johndoe 18y ago
But. If they were successful and made money without having to use pissy yellow color, did they truly need to switch to it to cater to the lowest common denominator ? Are the dumbasses who clicked more when the color was of piss worth it ? do you truly need users that act like animals, more on impulses than on thought ? Should you cater to the lowest common denominator and be the Microsoft of the web, or try to do the Best Thing and have a smaller market share but of much higher taste and disposable income, aka the Apple ?
- prospero 18y ago
  If your goal is to have people click on your ads, what other denominator is there than the click-through percentage? Google is a middleman for advertising, it's not for them to judge whether their viewers are worthy of clicking on their ads. And do you really think there's a socio-economic divide along the lines of blue vs. yellow text ads? Because that's pretty ridiculous.
- jfarmer 18y ago
  Lowest common denominator? Publishers want users to click. Google wants users to click. Advertisers want (good) users to click. Who loses here, besides the person who thinks yellow is "bad design?" Your customers have the final say, not the designer.