Apple does not have Google: the design of director-centered theory

In the apple, "1" is a magical number.

The final design decision a person has the final say. Not a few core groups. No data analyst. Without the unanimous approval of the committee. The decision to follow only one person's feeling go: Steve Jobs, CEO.

In contrast, Google's decision-making more traditional, many people have the right to talk. Compared with the designer's suggestion, group decision-making prefers to take experimental data to speak.

The game is far from over. Apple, which embodies only the taste of a monopolist, produces a better product, proving that there are not many groups, without the advice of thousands, and you can still get the design done.

Two years ago, technology blogger John Gruber proposed "The Auteur Theory of Design" in the design field. He believes that film production can provide valuable models for group decision-making in other areas, such as software.

"The central auteur, working with many creative people, has a distinctive view of the work and has creative control over what the director has been doing from start to finish. One decision after another can also make up an art, "Gruber said.

Gruber states: "The quality of any group creation is close to that of the responsible person, regardless of who the person is."

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

Garry Tan, a resident designer and co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup incubator, says "Steve Jobs is not always right and MobileMe is an example, but we know that all major design decisions go through his review. This is a director-centered character. "

Tan did not think Mr. Jobs's reputation as a great designer was due to his personal design, but because of his unique vision. He also hired a traditional designer, such as Jonathan. "Design elites also attract design talent," explains Tan.

Google has a creative lab, which started out as brand advertising. Recently, the lab was asked to provide design advice to engineering and user experience teams across all of Google's products. Chris L. Wiggins, the team's innovation director, has an advertising background where he views design as a group decision-making process, and the debate back and forth has been fruitful.

Wiggins said Steve has only one, and he is a genius. But it is necessary to show that we are talking about the design of web applications, not hardware or desktop software. So we adopted a different method from Apple. Google receives feedback from users over the internet and continues to make improvements.

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

Some designers who left Google because they could not fully display their talents did 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 hard to adopt at a strategic level," wrote Paul Adams on his blog "Think Outside In." Adams worked as a senior user experience at Google, leaving last year, now working at 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 does not have a professional designer. He complained that I am afraid no one at all Google fully understand the design of the basic principles and elements. "I raised a topic a while ago that the boundary line should be 3 pixels wide, 4 pixels or 5 pixels wide, and working in that environment would not work." The article was then headed "Goodbye Google."

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

In May Google, the eternal engineering company, failed to discover its design skills when hiring Pablo Villalba Villar, CEO of Teambox, an online project management company. Villalba later said he had no intention of leaving Teambox, but took part in Google's interview process. He strives to emphasize his talents in user interaction and product design, but recruiters only care if he has mastered 14 programming languages.

Villalba said: "The design can not get through the board." He was disappointed that Bowman's departure did not seem to change Google.

Not long ago, Google founder Larry Page back to the CEO, Google launched Google+, the new Google homepage and calendar. And promised to be more redesign. But all these jobs, like before, get done in a very crowded, noisy editor's house. Google lacks a real budget director, feel good on the hammer.

About the author: Randall Stross is a Silicon Valley author and professor of business at Saint Johns University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

Source: New York Times

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