🌱 Thoughts on Design
About Apple and A/B Testing:
I’ll soon share more of my ideas about what made our Apple approach special, but first, I’ll discuss a counternotion, an example of a process that can’t produce iPhone-like excellence. For this I turn to Douglas Bowman, a designer with a résumé that includes stints at Twitter and Wired. He also started at Google in 2006, becoming one of its early visual design leaders. Here’s how he justified his departure from the web search firm almost three years later:
“Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions … Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? OK, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision. Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better.”
Forty-one shades of blue sounds like a lot, but if they were willing to go that far at Google, why not test for a hundred or a thousand? If some data is good, more must be better, right? As Bowman suggests, it isn’t.
In this kind of test, commonly referred to in the high-tech industry as an A/B test, the choices are already laid out. In this Google pick-a-blue experiment, the result was always going to be one of those forty-one options. While the A/B test might be a good way to find the single most clickable shade of blue, the dynamic range between best and worst isn’t that much. More important, the opportunity cost of running all the trials meant there was less time available for everyone on the development team to dream up a design that people might like two, or three, or ten times more. A/B tests might be useful in finding a color that will get people to click a link more often, but it can’t produce a product that feels like a pleasing and integrated whole. There aren’t any refined-like responses, and there’s no recognition of the need to balance out the choices. Google factored out taste from its design process.
At Apple, we never would have dreamed of doing that, and we never staged any A/B tests for any of the software on the iPhone. When it came to choosing a color, we picked one. We used our good taste-and our knowledge of how to make software accessible to people with visual difficulties related to color perception-and we moved on.
Excerpt from Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age