[DanBC]

> I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because they didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design.

I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.

I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.

[codeddesign]

A/B testing data is only as good as the samples provided. They may have done wonderful A/B testing, but that the alternative designs were just so bad that the current design version made it through ;)

[braythwayt]

A/B testing is, fundamentally, hill-climbing. A/B testing will select the fastest horse, but never the strange wheeled box belching noxious fumes.