Re:Why Google has 200m reasons to put engineers over designers
by pavlov on Saturday August 02, 2014 @12:49PM
(#8125263)
In the world of the hippo, you ask the chief designer or the marketing director to pick a blue and that's the solution. In the world of data you can run experiments to find the right answer.
"Hippo" is an acronym for "highest paid person's opinion". Clever, but are we to believe that this dichotomy represents the whole spectrum of decision-making processes?
The Achilles' heel of data-driven approaches is that setting up the experiments can constrain the possible solutions too early. When you test 50 shades of blue, the answer you get will always be a shade of blue. A design-driven process could give you solutions that go beyond tweaking one value in CSS -- but that research won't be something that you can stick into an Excel spreadsheet.
"Hippo" is an acronym for "highest paid person's opinion". Clever, but are we to believe that this dichotomy represents the whole spectrum of decision-making processes?
The Achilles' heel of data-driven approaches is that setting up the experiments can constrain the possible solutions too early. When you test 50 shades of blue, the answer you get will always be a shade of blue. A design-driven process could give you solutions that go beyond tweaking one value in CSS -- but that research won't be something that you can stick into an Excel spreadsheet.