My buddy Doug Bowman is headed to Google. Doug — who I believe to be the best designer in our industry — was snatched up by Google to lead all their design efforts across all their products. This position wasn’t around before this announcement, it was a special position created just for Doug. Wow.
I truly think that both large companies and startups need to put “usable and attractive design” higher up on their priorities list, because right now design seems to be below Aeron chairs and cappuccino machines. I hate to quantify this opinion, but I’d venture to say that for every 10 companies reviewed on Mashable.com, Read/Write Web, Solution Watch, and others, only 1 or 2 have both an attractive and usable design. I can count on my fingers the number of startups who actually put thought and money into their user interface… hmm… here we go: Joyent, Cork’d, Rollyo, JotSpot, and Wayfaring off the top of my head.
So my question to all the entrepreneurs and businesspeople out there, do you have a “Doug Bowman” on your team, or did your cappuccino machine eat up your design budget?
About Mike Rundle
Interesting how many of those good looking UIs come from either of the Dan’s.
As for Wayfaring, I recently discovered the designers of its homepage, Sabotage Media who seem to have great creative style across the board.
So many startups put what looks to be zero effort into their interfaces; it’s not “agile” and hence not important. Completely the opposite is true.
While most startups are doomed to failed due to lack of a solid business model, many will disappear simply because their web apps are so unusable that nobody can sign up, use it or pay for the service.
Honestly, if you don’t have the time or interest in making your user experience top notch, then I dread to think what else you skimped on in your technical delivery.
Glad to see Wayfaring on there. It was good times designing that front page and it has seemed to go over extremely well with people. I think one aspect that really makes the Wayfaring front page works is that we were able to put so much into that “content” area by using javascript. So people were able to do a “walkthrough” without ever having to leave the page.
A cappuccino machine is pretty important though… ;-) And good point about putting more focus on usability/design in my product reviews (that probably wasn’t your real point, but it’s something I’ll take on board anyway).
Seriously though, what a great coup for Google. The annoying thing is I was at the Webstock conference in NZ and saw Doug’s presentation, but I must’ve missed his ‘scoop’ announcement – I only found out later on tech.meme. :-)
Mike,
You want a simple answer to that list: Dan Cederholm. He did 2 of those: Cork’d and Rollyo.
Thats why we’re around though, for companies to hire firms like yours and mine to do these things for them. :-)
Nice work, Doug! Stopdesign was one of the first sites I frequented when I made the move to learn more CSS/XHTML, web standards stuff, etc.
Maybe Google will get a facelift soon…
You are our Doug Bowman, Mike–now get back to work!