…who was, until recently, Visual Design Lead at Google.
He now works for Twitter.
It saddens me to see so many people knocking Doug for the less-than-inspiring design work found in many of Google’s products. Take this Gawker / Valleywag article, particularly the comments, for example.
If anyone of these deriders knew of Doug and the standard and quality of the work he produces, they’d be holding their tongues.
It helps to know the full story, so here it is from the horse’s mouth. It also helps to know a bit of background from others, like Joe Clark, and to get a picture of the sort of people that run the show at Google, such as Marissa Meyer.
It’s surprising Doug stuck it out at Google for as long as he did – with such a vast array of products, and what appears to be just one visual designer amongst a multitude of engineers and mathematicians – it must have been an incredibly trying experience.
All the best, Doug, for your move to Twitter! I hope they can really let you go to work, and I can’t wait to see the outcome!
Redesigning a corporate web environment
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009The Challenge
I’ve got this friend who is responsible for a corporate front-end web environment with almost a dozen browser-facing web applications. Pretty much all he can do at the moment is change static content in the antiquated and wildly inappropriate CMS. Changing anything significant requires implementation of an expensive one-off SDLC waterfall-type project with a business case, requirements-gathering, PM, BA, dedicated test-resource – the whole box and dice. These projects often under-deliver, with scope being reduced en route to avoid budget and deadline blowout.
He’s not happy with the way things are.
He’s got it into his head that it would be far better to create an easily-manageable front-end, with a unified, standardised UI under the control of his front-end web team. Key aspects are simplicity, speed, cost-efficiency, and trust – none of which can be used to describe the current state of affairs.
Some ideas
I was talking to my friend, and he said that at a high level, he’d like to abstract the various applications from the UI, where possible, by means of API/Web Services/etc. On the front-end would be a web application framework – He’s thinking Symfony or similar. He believes he has sufficient developer resource on his team to build/maintain/support this.
Some other ideas he’s been tossing around, in no particular order:
blendscale?More ideas…
… are welcome. He needs all the help he can get. While it’s all very bluesky (with pie) at the moment, he needs to turn it into a watertight, bulletproof, business case. And soon.
Posted in Commentary, Design, User Interface | 5 Comments »