Top UI designer from a search engine giant leaves

Top designer from a search engine giant left saying,

“When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

Yes, it's true that our team 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. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.”

I have different perspective on this subject. One of the prime objective/use case of designing is to provide elegant and easy to understand view of information(i.e. data). Isn't data, the prime factor to drive UI design ? Internet and WWW is all about sharing of data in different forms. Yes, if data doesn't looks good or is not applauding to customers, one must go and reinvent the wheel.

Being an engineer and not a designer, I would not care that much about shades, dimensions and style of a component. From business point of view, it matters a lot and it does make a difference. Example, read story : 'How Changing a Button Increased a Site's Annual Revenues by $300 Million'.

This is my - an outsider's relative opinion on the subject and with all respect to that top designer.