I thought Douglas Bowman’s recent post about his departure from Google was interesting.  As a visual designer, he felt Google’s data-driven culture was “paralyzing the company” and “preventing it from making any daring design decisions”.

Ten years ago (before I blogged, and therefore could prove this claim), I opined the future of user interface design would be a combination of visual design and direct marketing analytics.  (At the time, the DM folks were the ones that figured out the yellow envelope worked better than orange, etc. — the precursor to modern Web analytics).

The combination is key:  visual design without considering usage data is just flying blind.

Analytics without any design work doesn’t yield innovations & breakthroughs.  Think of it this way:  no amount of analysis of a farmer’s use of his horse and plow is going to get a design for a tractor.

Google’s clearly doing something right, but maybe they’ve taken analytics-driven design to the extreme?