This link makes an interesting read where Doug Bowman, the (ex) lead visual designer at Google, explains why he has left the company.
In a nutshell, Google has a data fetish and it’s hard to blame them. All that data crunching got them where they are today.
Mr. Bowman apparently got tired of all that data-driven decision making that completely wiped out the subjective (what’s creative and visionary in user experience design I would say) from top designer’s work. Unofficially, Bowman is heading for greener and more exciting design pastures, like those at Twitter, which I believe is the best candidate for being the new Google… of social media… that is becoming mainstreeam. Doug promises to disclose his new employer in a followup blog post.
Apparently, Google does not know how to deal with designers, and I’m not thinking of the software designer kind (those should be called software engineers anyway). The root of the problem seems to have been in the fact that Google has not highly ranked designers until 7 (yes, seven!) years after the company was founded. Sure, it may have not been a problem for a company that was known for the same simple welcome page for almost as many years. The problem can be seen in the CS PhD-like data-obsessed culture that has formed along the way.
Among many nice things and experience he has had at Google, Doug concludes by stating that he “[…] won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”
Adam Howell, another designer who left Google wrote in his post Google’s “designer drain”: “Test driven design certainly has a huge place on the web — but it has to coexist with opinionated design.” Amen! This is one of the points where Google and Apple differ a lot. Apart from the reality-distorting field of Steve Jobs’ vision and its killer combination with industrial design (Jonathan Ive) and execution (Apple engineers), Apple has a common design vision that drives the design of all Apple products and services. On the other, Google is diversifying ever so more, occasionally acquiring companies and it seems to be too hard to create and implement an all-encompassing design vision.
It’s time to ask: Should Google to (finally) shift gears? Seems that they should loosen up their elbows, ruffle their plumage hairdos and get more creative while maintaining the technical edge it definitely has in the several fields of the immensely relevant internet medium.
