Danny DeBelius

Google Fellow Amit Singhal, head of the search ranking and algorithm team, spoke with Fast Company about how his team worked through the user experience challenges of the search product’s auto-complete feature:

“One of the problems we faced early on in this design process was whether to have the entire query be one color or give a grayish version of the completion,” he explains. “This was a design problem. How about we use probability to pick the grayness of the text? If the probability is 100%, then you might as well make it black. If the probability is low, you want to make it more faded.”

This approach is very scientific (not to mention oddly familiar to 41 Blues), and Google wouldn’t have it any other way. To Singhal, the process must begin with a hypothesis: “Should the probability of completion govern the density of gray?” This hypothesis was tested internally and externally, which helped the team decide whether or not they were “hurting the user experience.”

I am always fascinated by Google’s dogmatic approach to these questions. While I would never argue that Google’s scientific approach is without merit, deferring to the raw data of A/B testing almost guarantees that these interfaces will rarely demonstrate any vision beyond the established interaction patterns of the day.

One great example where this scientific approach would have failed is Apple’s decision to forgo a hardware keyboard on the iPhone in favor of a software-based solution. We all remember the wide apprehension regarding the software keyboard when Apple launched the first iPhone. Users would never accept it, critics argued.

Almost four years later, the iPhone has firmly established the software keyboard interface as the new standard for mobile devices, and the hardware keyboard is increasingly absent from new smartphone designs as iOS and Android devices have come to dominate that market.

/via Andrew DeVigal

Aza Raskin:

2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence,” a lack of empathy is to blame.

Despite the allusion’s flair for the dramatic, Aza’s point rings true. My job is infinitely more enjoyable when the engineers I work with care about the interface. Likewise, I hope I exhibit an awareness of the challenges they face on the back-end.

/via Jeff Croft