By RANDALL STROSS
AT Apple, one is the magic number.
One person is the Decider for final design choices. Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O.
By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions.
The contest is not even close. The company that has a single arbiter of taste has been producing superior products, showing that you don’t need multiple teams and dozens or hundreds or thousands of voices.
Two years ago, the technology blogger John Gruber presented a talk, “The Auteur Theory of Design,” at the Macworld Expo. Mr. Gruber suggested how filmmaking could be a helpful model in guiding creative collaboration in other realms, like software.
The auteur, a film director who both has a distinctive vision for a work and exercises creative control, works with many other creative people. “What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions,” Mr. Gruber said. “And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art.”
“The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge,” Mr. Gruber pointed out.
Two years after he outlined his theory, it is still a touchstone in design circles for discussing Apple and its rivals.
Garry Tan, designer in residence and a venture partner at Y Combinator, an investor in start-ups, says: “Steve Jobs is not always right—MobileMe would be an example. But we do know that all major design decisions have to pass his muster. That is what an auteur does.”
Mr. Jobs has acquired a reputation as a great designer, Mr. Tan says, not because he personally makes the designs but because “he’s got the eye.” He has also hired classically trained designers like Jonathan Ive. “Design excellence also attracts design talent,” Mr. Tan explains.
Google has what it calls a “creative lab,” a group that had originally worked on advertising to promote its brand. More recently, the lab has been asked to supply a design vision to the engineering and user-experience groups that work on all of Google’s products. Chris L. Wiggins, the lab’s creative director, whose own background is in advertising, describes design as a collaborative process among groups “with really fruitful back-and-forth.”
“There’s only one Steve Jobs, and he’s a genius,” says Mr. Wiggins. “But it’s important to distinguish that we’re discussing the design of Web applications, not hardware or desktop software. And for that we take a different approach to design than Apple,” he says. Google, he says, utilizes the Web to pull feedback from users and make constant improvements.
Mr. Wiggins’s argument that Apple’s apples should not be compared to Google’s oranges does not explain, however, why Apple’s smartphone software gets much higher marks than Google’s.
GOOGLE’S ability to attract and retain design talent has not been helped by the departure of designers who felt their expertise was not fully appreciated. “Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it’s very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level,” writes Paul Adams on his blog, “Think Outside In.” Mr. Adams was a senior user-experience researcher at Google until last year; he is now at Facebook.
Douglas Bowman is another example. He was hired as Google’s first visual designer in 2006, when the company was already seven years old. “Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer,” he wrote in his blog Stopdesign in 2009. He complained that there was no one at or near the helm of Google who “thoroughly understands the principles and elements of design” “I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide,” Mr. Bowman wrote, adding, “I can’t operate in an environment like that.” His post was titled, “Goodbye, Google.”
Mr. Bowman’s departure spurred other designers with experience at either Google or Apple to comment on differences between the two companies. Mr. Gruber, at his Daring Fireball blog, concisely summarized one account under the headline “Apple Is a Design Company With Engineers; Google Is an Engineering Company With Designers.”
In May, Google, ever the engineering company, showed an unwillingness to notice design expertise when it tried to recruit Pablo Villalba Villar, the chief executive of Teambox, an online project management company. Mr. Villalba later wrote that he had no intention of leaving Teambox and cooperated to experience Google’s hiring process for himself. He tried to call attention to his main expertise in user interaction and product design. But he said that what the recruiter wanted to know was his mastery of 14 programming languages.
Mr. Villalba was dismayed that Google did not appear to have changed since Mr. Bowman left. “Design can’t be done by committee,” he said.
Recently, as Larry Page, the company co-founder, began his tenure as C.E.O., , Google rolled out Google+ and a new look for the Google home page, Gmail and its calendar. More redesigns have been promised. But they will be produced, as before, within a very crowded and noisy editing booth. Google does not have a true auteur who unilaterally decides on the final cut.
[Source : International Herald Tribune. Thank You.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com]
