Design Thinking vs. Data Thinking

A good article, and applicable also to why some of Google's projects succeed and others fail. What fail? Ones that rely upon a deep understanding of social interactions: Orkut, Buzz, Wave. These social applications/networks don't have a specific purpose they just are and people can use them how they want. Compare that to Gmail, Google Docs, AdWords. Singularly-purposed applications that no one disagrees about how they should be used. Google is great at solving problems, not so great at creatively thinking about situations that may not be problems and may not have a direct solution.

The problem I have with this article is that it describes Google's designs as "bland" but gives no examples. What exactly is bland about which products?

The problem with too much "design thinking" is that you end up trying to "innovate" without taking user needs into perspective. To a designer aching to flex his design muscles, a clean and usable design probably comes off as "bland."

I'd argue that Google is much more usable than its competitors. They don't overdo their design, and that's a good thing.

While I distrust the author's claims to be able to reliably distinguish devices created by data thinking and design thining irrespective of final quality (I'm having a hard time thinking of a situation more rife with the potential for hindsight bias) he does make a number of good points.

Perhaps the best was that if you're trying to grow a market then being like your competitors is probably the wrong was to go about. A common expression of mockery with a group of friends is that a company is "trying to differentiate by embracing the dominant paradigm." These seems related.

Perhaps UI design and hardware design are not directly comparable on this basis? You can't run automated testing or user analytics on a handset.

What's more to the point, testing is for increasing a specific outcome or make sure it happens. It's not about what Christopher Alexander would call "the quality without a name."