Designer versus Engineer War at Google; Does Visual Design Matter?

A Google designer recently quit decrying Google’s over-reliance on data, even for simple design decisions. Is it bad or is the designer plain wrong?

I think if a design decision can be reduced to a problem solvable by data then it is absolutely the right way to go. Google’s core competency is data and statistical data analysis is the best way to make such decision, when possible. So Google is prefectly right in taking a data-centric approach to design problems. Often designers don’t realize the impact of their hair-brained schemes and how it will affect the bottomline of business.

To the designer it was a simple question of 3 pixel versus 4 pixel. What he doesn’t realize is that the same layout will be visible by hundreds of millions of people daily. When you have such a huge data as Google why not just test such decisions on a sample group and find out how they respond?

I think, in this case, Google data-centric approach is the way to go. They have too much at stake to change designs simply based on a designer’s whim.

Marcus of plentyoffish is earning several millions every month from a fully automated dating with potentially the crappiest design on the web. Google is earning billions with a super-simplistic design, no Flash, no cool Javascript effects on Google.com. Does visual design (look and feel of a website, not functional aspects) really matter?

What do you think?