More on data driven design
It’s hilarious to listen to and read designers talking about how they think google design sucks.
For example, in this podcast they all agree at the end that, in their expert design opinions, google needs to add more padding and whitespace.
This is really really silly given that Marissa Mayer has said that Google actually did try adding whitespace in various places and found that a larger amount of whitespace on search result pages Decreased the efficacy of the page, and resulted in less clicks, which, for Google, means less money!
To me, this all ties in to the gigantically false assumption that experience and training are predictors of success. Witness the studies that show that experience building startups has only a 2-ish percent impact on the success of future startups. Or the studies that show that the getting an MBA is likely, for most, to lead to a lower lifetime income.
April 05, 2009
