Google: Focus on the User and ALL else Will Follow
Google’s viewpoint on Design:
“One of the ways in which we achieve this fast feel is to have a very minimalist look. Also, Google focuses on aggregating the data and presenting it to the users, so we don’t want it to feel editorialized. We want it to feel machine driven, so people understand that it’s not like we’re presenting results with a certain point of view.”
“As a design team, we can’t afford to have very high touch involvement with every single project, where we create pixel-perfect designs and have web developers that are implementing the front end exactly to the specifications,” she says.
“Any kind of design system that we create has to be incredibly practical to implement. Our design strategy is all about creating an experience that’s fast, not only in terms of latency, but also in terms of human cognition and perception.
Data informs decision-making but it’s less useful for conceiving and building conceptually new directions. It’s most useful for optimizing and refining an established concept.”
Historically, engineers vastly outnumber designers at Google (Au herself has degrees in electrical and computer engineering), which makes scaling the design organization a big challenge.
“Rather than having 30 different styles of tabs, we just choose one or two,” Au says, “and they’re the canonical types that have been proven to work. Then we create a toolkit for the developers, so that for basic interactions, where the patterns are pretty known and common, they’ll have reusable components. Then at least they can get 70 to 80 per cent of the way there without having a designer involved.”
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