Douglas Bowman recently left Google, as they preferred analytics to design. He was one of the top visual designers at Google and has now left to become creative director at Twitter. Douglas has since said that Google takes decisions on design based on analytics data rather than their designers suggestions. Apparently before he could make a decision on any design he would have to test most of the options online, seeing which option was clicked more, shown more etc.. and sometimes the differences could be as simple as how tall a line of text was.
“Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions,” Douglas wrote in his own blog.
In my opinion (and I don’t claim to be a designer) designers aren’t always right, but they know what looks good and looking good is usually what gets the job done in web design.
