This morning I saw the following blog post from Google’s lead designer,  Douglas Bowman,  on why he is leaving Google:  http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

It boils down to one reason- Google designs by testing, not by what one (or several) design guru’s say looks good.  I can appreciate both sides of this story- certainly great design cannot be created by machines- design still has, and always will have it’s place. That being said, Google is not known as a design oriented organization, and their style is very geeky, plain, and barebones.

As a testing and data junkie, I can say that if you have the shear volume of traffic that Google has, there is little reason not to test everything.  Given the extreme simplicity of Google’s designs, it is not only possible to test 41 different shades of blue, but it is fairly easy.  For most sites, this is simply not feasible- due to more complex page layouts and far less traffic.

So where does this leave design?  In my opinion, rely on designers to get started with a new look or direction, and then use testing to refine and perfect the design.  I always tell designers that the best thing about testing is that you get to try several great ideas, instead of just providing one final deliverable.  Tests cannot design the design, only perfect it from a profitability perspective.