Douglas Bowman

Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time. It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optimize products that already have their flywheels spinning, and got insanely lucky by betting on the right horse back in 1999. 0: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/12/04/marissa-mayer-s… 1: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Well said. It should be noted that it was under this individual's reign at Google that the notorious 41 tints of blue occurred[1], which was clearly an indicator of abject ineptitude regarding art and design. The comment about Illustrator was cringe worthy. The idea that someone is so filled with hubris regarding a field well outside their domain has the wafts of Denning - Krugerism pluming out. [1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

The classic blog post on this: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html (aka "41 shades of blue").

You're probably thinking of Doug Bowman's classic "Goodbye Google" post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html I think two things are entirely possible here: One, that in reaction to Bowman's high-profile indictment of Google's design culture, there has been a shift over the past few years toward Apple-like, auteur-driven design at Google, that was misapplied in this case, or (I think more likely), every detail of the new Gmail UI was extensively tested by itself, but there was no final arbiter to say "you know what? This one part sucks; let's change it despite the data."

This "more wood behind fewer arrows" approach sounds great to me as long as they keep trying new things. The only thing that concerns me about the approach is along the lines of what Doug Bowman said when he quit[0]: relying on data too much can blind you to what cannot be represented in data. Or, maybe, as Steve Jobs said: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."[1] I'm optimistic that Larry Page is finding a way that comes from conviction in combination with data. [0]: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html [1]: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may1998/nf80512d.htm

This is an older but relevant post from a former Google designer: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html More anecdotally, I find that the best design and illustration I've seen from Google is usually on a very small thing: Google doodles, the CR-48 pilot program videos and illustrations, the Google TV quick tour. Some amazing work has gone into Chrome marketing. But it's almost never on a product. Their products often feel like the design was managed by committees of engineers. That's not to knock any of Google's product designers, but it often feels like they're not allowed to make decisions on anything that really matters.

Perhaps they were the best blues of the 41 shades... (cf. http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html)

OK, what did I do? When Doug Bowman left Google he wrote a rather revealing critique of their attitude toward design, and the general disregard for it in their corporate culture: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html Given that, is it really all that unreasonable to point out that Google's UI problems probably are not going to be solved by one person, no matter how much the general community likes him (after all, Bowman's pretty well-loved in the design community, and look what happened to him)?

One-line css classes is horrible, even if you don't have scanning tools at your disposal. It makes it harder to work with your CSS and know what is going on. I prefer this style, indent the last brace: http://stopdesign.com/css/base.css With decent commenting and closing bracket indented, CSS is real easy to browse and understand which section of your page / site you are working on. The only other option I'd consider is Google's recommendation for defining one attribute, and piling on a ton of selectors that require that attribute. It's totally difficult to maintain but at the same time it makes your site load slightly faster if you have time to spare. Wish there was a program to do convert CSS coding styles automatically... Also, blueprint.css style of doing CSS where you append a bunch of classes to each HTML element makes me want to stab my eye with a pencil. my 0.02

That's a very narrow definition of vector vs raster, the end result looks very different from a photograph. Vector-based drawings have a certain swoopy hand-drawn style to them, vs the realism of altering and recombining photorealistic images. An example of the opposite style is the giant pencil in the new stopdesign layout: http://stopdesign.com/ It's obviously sourced from real life, rather than generated from scratch.

If Wieseltier's aim was to provide an ex post facto justification of what went down at the New Republic, he's certainly nailed it. The strawmen he constructs without a whit of evidence wouldn't pass freshman comp; that he's accorded greater privilege demonstrates just how high the shit must have been piled at The New Republic's stables. What's interesting is we're starting to see the outlines of the narrative that will define the intellectual critique of silicon valley, and it's an old chestnut. It's the line that silicon valley is all machine and no soul -- a group of folks interested in success only without any capability for reflection, intuition, emotion. That in the quest to ask 'does it work,' we fail to ask 'should it work?' Robots and nerds, in essence. It's a line that can be traced back to Doug Bowman's '41 shades of blue' post[0] -- itself beginning to define the narrative of Google (and Marissa in particular) as pencil-necked spreadsheet jockeys who wouldn't know good taste if it hit them over the head. This narrative is, frankly, bullshit. Anybody who's worked on any sort of technology product knows the limits of data in decision-making -- I have yet to see any place where gut feel didn't radically dictate the shape and vision of every company. Similarly, to argue that the Internet is anything other than the most effective device for the production of the same humanistic, intellectual material that Wieseltier bemoans the loss of is to demonstrate an utter…

First: Good design and functionality are the same thing. The saying goes form over function, not design over function. If one thing functions better than another, it can be described as better design. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that some of the simpler proposed UI changes (better visual separation, bigger fonts, clearer visual distinction of elements, good-sized clickable iconic images) would improve the Zappos site tremendously. Second: Most of the posts on this page are good examples of what kills me working as a web guy. Engineers/Analysts want everything down to the color of each link to be data driven, to the point of irrationality. To me it's obvious when a design has been manhandled by this division of a Web team. Not all points of data are meaningful, and data does not know all ("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." http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html) Developers don't grasp every detail of what good design should be and tend to simplify and marginalize the web designer job. (Although seeing a lot of the "talent" out there, I can understand why this happens a lot. Great web designers are rare, hold on to them tightly) Designers have a hell of a time describing why their abstract ideas have practical implications.…

At least they have the precisely correct blue, though. https://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Google is the company that user-tested 41 shades of blue¹. Malice or not, that yellow was surely intentional, and working as intended. [1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

You're thinking of Doug Bowman. http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.

This really reminds me of the depressing way that Google optimised the blue colour of a button, while ignoring all other considerations: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html If you trust your metrics and nothing else, you have to be very sure that your metrics encompass every aspect of the reality you are modelling. If they just tell you about clicks and sales, they might be missing longer-term objectives like user satisfaction and retention.

Totally right. That's why the design by consensus is always wrong. The brand is now biased. MM had a reputation of being intrusive even on silly details making the design process horrible and with crappy results. From this I remember various things you may remember too: 1. The Google favicon. They did thousands and the one they choosed was crappiest one. They had to change it later. 2. The Google favicon with blue. Also, they did silly tests. Now that thing is gone. I think this post resumes it well http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

The example about Google engineers "thinking like designers" is actually an example of "engineers thinking like engineers thinking about engineering a color choice" which the author is calling design. This is embarrassing. Engineers shouldn't think about design. Remember Douglas Bowman? http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html People want to use things - i.e. products, digital or otherwise - with style and performance. People, real people, don't give a rats ass about computer science or design - they just want the product to do something for them and they want to look cool doing it. With their expectations of performance aside for the moment, there is nothing cool about engineers "optimizing" style.

Google leans pretty heavily on machine learning for even trivial design choices http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html mentions the infamous testing of 41 shades of bue to decide which was the correct one. But truly someone has to design the learning system, at some level you will always have design, if it is the design of how the design is to adapt to it's environment.

It looks like the slides call it "Kennedy", not "Kanna", for whatever reason. In any case, don't miss the last slide, where there's a chart suggesting a quantitative comparison of two shades of blue: http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/12/2863672/google-kanna-and-strawman-re… I presume this is a self-aware reference to the "testing shades of blue" story that designer Douglas Bowman brought to wide attention three years ago, in his Google farewell blog post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Surprised no one has mentioned Doug Bowman's reasons for leaving Google, which seems in part because of extensive use of A/B testing. I don't really know enough to comment on it but it seems relevant: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

One of the defining articles on this exact topic was written by Doug Bowman back in 2003: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2003/09/03/absolute.html

I don't have more info on that statement, but it reminds me of this: When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. From here: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Ask Doug Bowman: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html And [that] data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

> I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine. I also find it telling that they let developers / engineers do eye tracking and user research, as opposed to designers / usability people. > I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text. Google's data-centricism and engineering-informed design decisions have seen much pushback lately, as exemplified by the departure of lead designer Douglas Bowman: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

On the other hand, "When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions." http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Here's the post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Looks like Douglas Bowman was right and its only got worse since he bailed. http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

I think this is the link you are referring to: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Not according to this man's post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html