The hyper-engineered corporation

Google’s webdesigner Douglas Bowman left the company for Twitter because it found Google’s obsession for pretesting even the smallest design decisions onerous. Google says it will stay the course.

Ping – Should Design Be Held Back by a Tyranny of Data? – NYTimes.com:

CAN a company blunt its innovation edge if it listens to its customers too closely? Can its products become dull if they are tailored to match exactly what users say they want? These questions surfaced recently when Douglas Bowman, a top visual designer, left Google. Skip to next paragraph Related Times Topics: Google Inc. Add to Portfolio * Google Inc Go to your Portfolio » In a rare display of independence among otherwise tight-lipped current and former Googlers, Mr. Bowman laid out on his blog the reasons for his abrupt exit, creating a bit of a commotion in the technology blogosphere. There was no sugarcoating. Mr. Bowman essentially said that Google was not friendly to designers. Mr. Bowman’s main complaint is that in Google’s engineering-driven culture, data trumps everything else. When he would come up with a design decision, no matter how minute, he was asked to back it up with data. Before he could decide whether a line on a Web page should be three, four or five pixels wide, for example, he had to put up test versions of all three pages on the Web. Different groups of users would see different versions, and their clicking behavior, or the amount of time they spent on a page, would help pick a winner.