Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution

Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution | The Verge.

Not sure how I missed this article when it was originally posted back in January, but man is this a good one. Especially this:

Great design is not something anybody has traditionally expected from Google. Infamously, the company used to focus on A/B testing tiny, incremental changes like 41 different shades of blue for links instead of trusting its designers to create and execute on an overall vision. The “design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data” led its very first visual designer, Douglas Bowman, to leave in 2009.

I’ve recently proclaimed that my UX and Design philosophy is about the user. I don’t want that to be confused with it being about DATA. The user and data are 2 very different things.