Douglas Bowman

First:
Good design and functionality are the same thing. The saying goes form over function, not design over function. If one thing functions better than another, it can be described as better design.

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that some of the simpler proposed UI changes (better visual separation, bigger fonts, clearer visual distinction of elements, good-sized clickable iconic images) would improve the Zappos site tremendously.

Second:
Most of the posts on this page are good examples of what kills me working as a web guy.

Engineers/Analysts want everything down to the color of each link to be data driven, to the point of irrationality. To me it's obvious when a design has been manhandled by this division of a Web team. Not all points of data are meaningful, and data does not know all ("Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case." http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html)

Developers don't grasp every detail of what good design should be and tend to simplify and marginalize the web designer job. (Although seeing a lot of the "talent" out there, I can understand why this happens a lot. Great web designers are rare, hold on to them tightly)

Designers have a hell of a time describing why their abstract ideas have practical implications.…

If Wieseltier's aim was to provide an ex post facto justification of what went down at the New Republic, he's certainly nailed it. The strawmen he constructs without a whit of evidence wouldn't pass freshman comp; that he's accorded greater privilege demonstrates just how high the shit must have been piled at The New Republic's stables.

What's interesting is we're starting to see the outlines of the narrative that will define the intellectual critique of silicon valley, and it's an old chestnut.

It's the line that silicon valley is all machine and no soul -- a group of folks interested in success only without any capability for reflection, intuition, emotion. That in the quest to ask 'does it work,' we fail to ask 'should it work?' Robots and nerds, in essence.

It's a line that can be traced back to Doug Bowman's '41 shades of blue' post[0] -- itself beginning to define the narrative of Google (and Marissa in particular) as pencil-necked spreadsheet jockeys who wouldn't know good taste if it hit them over the head.

This narrative is, frankly, bullshit. Anybody who's worked on any sort of technology product knows the limits of data in decision-making -- I have yet to see any place where gut feel didn't radically dictate the shape and vision of every company. Similarly, to argue that the Internet is anything other than the most effective device for the production of the same humanistic, intellectual material that Wieseltier bemoans the loss of is to demonstrate an utter…

One-line css classes is horrible, even if you don't have scanning tools at your disposal. It makes it harder to work with your CSS and know what is going on.

I prefer this style, indent the last brace:

http://stopdesign.com/css/base.css

With decent commenting and closing bracket indented, CSS is real easy to browse and understand which section of your page / site you are working on.

The only other option I'd consider is Google's recommendation for defining one attribute, and piling on a ton of selectors that require that attribute. It's totally difficult to maintain but at the same time it makes your site load slightly faster if you have time to spare. Wish there was a program to do convert CSS coding styles automatically...

Also, blueprint.css style of doing CSS where you append a bunch of classes to each HTML element makes me want to stab my eye with a pencil.

my 0.02

The example about Google engineers "thinking like designers" is actually an example of "engineers thinking like engineers thinking about engineering a color choice" which the author is calling design. This is embarrassing. Engineers shouldn't think about design. Remember Douglas Bowman? http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

People want to use things - i.e. products, digital or otherwise - with style and performance. People, real people, don't give a rats ass about computer science or design - they just want the product to do something for them and they want to look cool doing it. With their expectations of performance aside for the moment, there is nothing cool about engineers "optimizing" style.

Mayer will be walking away with a $158M golden parachute[0], and will undoubtedly have another nice executive position lined up in no time.

It's amazing how much respect she's garnered in the tech community. From all the public info on her, she doesn't seem to have much product vision - rather, she's just a manager who's good at making data-driven decisions (the infamous "41 shades of blue"[1]) to incrementally optimize products that already have their flywheels spinning, and got insanely lucky by betting on the right horse back in 1999.

0: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2015/12/04/marissa-mayer-severance-benefits/76781384/

1: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

> I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine.

I also find it telling that they let developers / engineers do eye tracking and user research, as opposed to designers / usability people.

> I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.

Google's data-centricism and engineering-informed design decisions have seen much pushback lately, as exemplified by the departure of lead designer Douglas Bowman:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html