Design with Conviction
Commit to a unique voice.
Throughout my career, I've clocked untold miles at all kinds of receptions, conferences, and cocktail parties. After a party not terribly long ago, I was thinking about how the different kinds of conversations you have at a cocktail party make a good metaphor for the ways that companies use design. Our fellow party guests are the bore, the braggart, and the conversationalist.
The bore is Google. You might be thinking, “Oh, I'd love to be as boring and lucrative as Google.” After all, Google has an estimated 1 billion daily users and is so ubiquitous that its name has become a verb in I don't know how many languages. Yet I think of Google as the kind of boring person at a party who doesn't have much to contribute. Such people are polite and attentive, and perhaps good listeners. They look at you in a sympathetic way and say, “Tell me about you.” You sense their lack of self-confidence while they prod you for compliments about how great they look tonight in that Brioni suit.
What is so boring about Google? As I mentioned in Chapter 5, Google drives its design process by the numbers. The company tests prototypes and variations with huge numbers of users to optimize every visual detail on every page, as when it ran tests on 41 shades of blue1 for the HTML links on its pages. In fact, Google runs tests to collect data to justify just about ...
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