Apple has but not Google: the director of the Design Center

At Apple, "1" is a magical figure.

The final design decides that one person is the boss. Rather than a few caucuses. No data analyst. Without the unanimous approval of the Committee. Decisions follow only one person's feelings: Steve Jobs, CEO.

In contrast, Google's decision-making approach is more traditional, many people have the right to deal with. Group decisions prefer to speak with experimental data than designers suggest.

The game is far from over. Apple, which embodies only the taste of an arbitrary person, makes a better product, proving that without a few teams and thousands of suggestions, you can still get the design done.

Two years ago, tech blogger John Gruber proposed "the director of the design field (the Auteur theory)". He believes that filmmaking can provide valuable models for group decisions in other areas, such as software.

"The Central Director (auteur) works with a lot of creative people who have a different view of the work, and they have creative control, and what the director does is keep the ground going." Only one decision after another can constitute an art. "Gruber said.

"Any group creates quality that is close to the taste level of the person in charge, regardless of who it is," Gruber said. ”

The theory has been put forward for two years, and the theory will still come in handy when people in the design circle talk about Apple and its rivals.

Garry Tan, a resident designer and business incubator Y Combinator partner, believes that "Steve Jobs is not always right, MobileMe is an example." But we know that all the major design decisions have to go through his review. This is the role of a director-centered speaker. ”

Tan thinks that all Mr. Jobs's reputation for being a great designer is not because he designed it himself, but because he has a unique vision. He also employs a designer who has traditionally been nurtured, such as Jonathan. "Design elites also attract design geniuses," he said. Tan explains.

Google has an innovation Lab (creative Lab), the group that is most responsible for branding advertising. The lab was recently asked to provide design advice to the engineering and user Experience team, which covers all of Google's products. The group's innovation director, Chris L. Wiggins, has a background in advertising work, and he sees design as a group decision-making process, and returns to the discussion fruitful.

Wiggins says Steve has only one, and he's a genius. But it's important to say that we're talking about the design of Web apps, not hardware or desktop software. So we used a different approach than Apple. Google receives feedback from users via the Internet and continues to improve.

Wiggins that Apple is Apple, Google is an orange, the two are not comparable, but this does not explain why Apple's smartphone software than Google's better.

Some designers are not able to fully display their talent and leave Google, but this does not improve Google's ability to attract and retain design talent. "Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, your advice is difficult to adopt at a strategic level." "Paul Adams in his blog," "Outside in." wrote on. Adams, a senior user experience at Google, resigned last year and is now working for Facebook.

Douglas Bowman is another example. He became Google's first visual designer in 2006, when Google was seven years old. He thinks seven years is too long for a company that doesn't even have a professional designer. He complains that no one in the whole of Google can fully understand the fundamentals and elements of design. "I raised a topic a while ago, the boundary line should be 3 pixel wide, or 4 pixel or 5 pixel wide." Work cannot unfold in such an environment. "The title of that article was" Goodbye to Google ".

Bowman's departure allowed people who worked for Google or Apple to start talking about the differences between the two companies. Gruber an accurate description: Apple is a design company with engineers; Google is a designer engineering company.

Google, a permanent engineering company, failed to discover its design skills in May when it hired Teambox, the CEO of an online project management company, Pablo Villalba Villar. Villalba later said he had no intention of leaving Teambox, but took part in the Google interview process. He tried to emphasise his skills in user interaction and product design, but recruiters only cared if he mastered 14 programming languages.

"The design cannot be done through the committee," Villalba said. He thought Bowman's departure didn't seem to change Google, and he was disappointed.

Google founder Larry Page has recently ceo,google to Google +, the new homepage and calendar. And promised to do more redesign. But all this work, as before, will be done in a very crowded, noisy editorial shed. Google lacks a director who really has the final say, and feels good about it final.

Via: New York Times

Author Profile: Randall Stross is a Silicon Valley writer and professor of Business studies at St. Jones University. E-mail:stross@nytimes.com.

Of course, we can also compare Apple and Google's corporate culture through org charts:

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