The 41 Blues Blues

“Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.”– John Gunther

It's hard, as a designer , not to feel for Douglas Bowman, the guy that left Google after leading a design team for three years after being frustrated by things like testing 41 shades of blue (Ordered by Marissa Mayer) on users to see which one generated more clicks. This is exactly the practice that kills innovation and makes me try the door of the silver Honda parked in front of my silver Toyota – they look the same because the people that manufactured them looked at the same statistics to generate the same car for the same demographic using the same understanding of mechanic principals. The designers were just executors with very little subjective input.

What made Google great is understanding of users’ needs – first, in building an audience by providing better search results and later with a scalable model that gave people a flexible solution, revolutionizing advertising, fitted to their needs and delivering better results for the buck than anything else. Many other great product followed.

My first encounter with Google was in 1999, when a colleague named Aaron Rutledge, who I’m a big fan of and at the time mainly a front-end wizard (he has done many other things since), pointed it out to me saying that I should really check out this search engine by these two guys from Stanford.

I remember the first glimpse – if it wasn’t recommended by someone I had trusted, I wouldn’t grant it another look. Not because of the simplicity, but because I thought it was so ugly;

The logo looked like a cheap rip-off of the Yahoo logo (Perhaps because it was) and the whole page looked dodgy. However, on second look I saw the ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button and thought that this does look like a student project and these guys are cool, they do not take themselves too seriously. Ugly now seemed charmingly quirky. When I tried it, it produced superior results to other search engines I was using, so I haven’t looked back since.

Side note – When I heard the logo was redesigned, I was looking forward to see the result – I was disappointed. Still looks like a school project. Still ugly. By now, however, it may have become somewhat nostalgic.

Most people, when using the Google core product, only encounter a little search box on the top right hand corner of their browser and the search results page, yet the image everyone remembers is of the simple white search screen. This was what it looked like when they made it big – so many people attribute at least some of the success to it (and they may be right). It is also used by people to discredit designers – “ look what engineers and scientists can do without you”. My feeling is that Google succeeded in spite of it’s visual design, because it provided great products based on understanding of people’s needs.

While optimizing definitely hold water, measuring 41 shades of blue seems to me like a case of ludic fallacy

(from Wikipedia):

• It is impossible to be in possession of all the information.
• Very small unknown variations in the data could have a huge impact (the Butterfly effect).
• Theories/models based on empirical data are flawed, as events that have not taken place before cannot be accounted for.

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There's a famous saying by Henry Ford: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses’’’. But it was when Ford concentrated in continuous optimization of his existing models that he lost the lead to the competition who started selling colored cars of all things (makes one wonder how many shades of blue they tested).

I hope Google will keep making great products by great leaps, addressing users’ needs, not slipping into mediocrity by constant petty optimizing and crushing of human creativity.