Universal Principles of UX

95

Metric-based design is silly.

“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. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.”

And that’s how Google lost its most prominent designer, Doug Bowman, to Twitter in 2009. It’s also the moment Google doubled down on metric-based design and officially sided with engineers over designers. To the wider design community, this signaled that Google believes design is ...