Today Google released a sleek looking new search application for the iPad. It looks great. If you haven’t seen it yet, you may be wondering why you’d use something like that, considering Safari already includes an interface to Google search. The way I see it, this is not just about a search application. This is a trojan horse that just carried quite a chunk of Chrome into Apple’s tablet. To see what I mean, look at the official video below:

Quite a bit more than search, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I for one would like to see Google take a stab at a feature-complete iPad browser, even though I’ll say that mobile Safari does work pretty well. My opinion is then out of knowing how healthy competition would be this particular field.

At this point, I’m not sure any company other than Google can compete with Apple in terms of browser experience on tablets. There are other third-party iPad browsers out there (including Opera Mini – that as some might remember was, for a few years, the only mobile browser people knew), but none that really shines and takes advantage of the platform.

My hope is that Google’s own expertise in building a tablet-oriented OS in Android (and the fact that they have a great team of User Experience designers) culminates not a browser hidden behind a search app, but an actual browser that happens to do search amazingly well.

A few days ago we were preparing for a presentation to students of a masters degree in design, and in our preparation, a question came up: “what’s the role of the designer in our particular team?”

I would argue that in most startups and consulting companies these days – particularly those with a limited headcount -, the main role of the designer should be that of curating/vetoing ideas. This is particularly true when working in an agile environment when everyone takes responsibility for crafting features and deploying code. In such a team, the development process is probably going to flow better if decisions regarding the experience and UI are consulted with the designer rather than always going through him. In short: developers work higher in the stack (they are expected to deliver interface work), and the designer is able to cover more ground and have a curation role across the project as a whole.

In smaller teams there’s little room for someone that only does design, just as there’s typically little room for an engineer who can only do one particular thing. So, playing on everyone’s strengths by empowering engineers to deliver code top to bottom, and applying design expertise as a curation tool sounds like a way to optimize a company’s process. Less time lost in waterfall is never a bad thing.

Rest in peace, Steve.