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Google Is Really Good At Design
Joshua Topolsky, writing for The Outline: The stuff Google showed off on October 4 was brazenly designed and strangely, invitingly touchable. These gadgets were soft, colorful... delightful? They looked human, but like something future humans had made; people who'd gotten righteously drunk with aliens. You could imagine them in your living room, your den, your bedroom. Your teleportation chamber. A fuzzy little donut you can have a conversation with. A VR headset in stunning pink. A phone with playful pops of color and an interface that seems to presage what you want, when you want it. It's weird. It's subtle. It's... good. It's Google? It's Google.
It was only a few years ago that Google was actually something of a laughing stock when it came to design. As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth's early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale. These are useful priorities for a utilitarian search engine, but didn't translate well to many of the company's other products. Design -- the mysterious intersection of art and communication -- was a second-class citizen at Google, subordinate to The Data. That much was clear from the top down.
Enter Matias Duarte, the design impresario who was responsible for the Sidekick's UI (a wacky, yet strangely prescient mobile-everything concept) and later, the revolutionary (though ill-fated) webOS -- the striking mobile operating system and design language that would be Palm's final, valiant attempt at reclaiming the mobile market. Duarte was hired by Google in 2013 (initially as Android's User Experience Director, though he is now VP of design at the company), and spearheaded a complete reset of the company's visual and functional instincts. But even Duarte was aware of the design challenges his new role presented. "I never thought I'd work for Google," he told Surface Magazine in August. "I had zero ambition to work for Google. Everybody knew Google was a terrible place for design." Duarte went to work on a system that would ultimately be dubbed Material Design -- a set of principles that not only began to dictate how Android should look and work as a mobile operating system, but also triggered the march toward a unified system of design that slowly but surely pulled Google's disparate network of services into something that much more closely resembled a singular vision. A school of thought. A family.
It was only a few years ago that Google was actually something of a laughing stock when it came to design. As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth's early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale. These are useful priorities for a utilitarian search engine, but didn't translate well to many of the company's other products. Design -- the mysterious intersection of art and communication -- was a second-class citizen at Google, subordinate to The Data. That much was clear from the top down.
Enter Matias Duarte, the design impresario who was responsible for the Sidekick's UI (a wacky, yet strangely prescient mobile-everything concept) and later, the revolutionary (though ill-fated) webOS -- the striking mobile operating system and design language that would be Palm's final, valiant attempt at reclaiming the mobile market. Duarte was hired by Google in 2013 (initially as Android's User Experience Director, though he is now VP of design at the company), and spearheaded a complete reset of the company's visual and functional instincts. But even Duarte was aware of the design challenges his new role presented. "I never thought I'd work for Google," he told Surface Magazine in August. "I had zero ambition to work for Google. Everybody knew Google was a terrible place for design." Duarte went to work on a system that would ultimately be dubbed Material Design -- a set of principles that not only began to dictate how Android should look and work as a mobile operating system, but also triggered the march toward a unified system of design that slowly but surely pulled Google's disparate network of services into something that much more closely resembled a singular vision. A school of thought. A family.
the bad fucking thing about this is that i have to listen some exec dolt talk about how they got some new whizwhiz wweewee guru now at gooooooooogle and how they're good at design now at gooooogle
Don't worry too much about it. Everyone can tell their products are terrible. Google is not good at design.
Compare Google maps and Bing maps. The UX on Bing maps is vastly superior. Same for Bing images. As a search engine Bing is awful but the frontend (at least for images) is much better. Even Yahoo Search gives a better experience for images than Google.
Or look at browsers. Is changing settings a delightful experience in Chrome, compared to Firefox or Safari? Absolutely not. It feels weird, you can never tell if you've looked at all the options, and when you change something it's not immediately clear if it's saved or not. These are all things that a junior designer could tell are wrong.
If you really want a scare, open the developer tools that every developer knows as F12 but that somehow Google is trying to migrate to CTRL-Shift-I. Try to find the cookies or SSL certificates. Depending on the version of Chrome, they're not gonna be in the same place. Why? What problem are they trying to solve? All that was needed in terms of features and capabilities was already present in Firebug years ago. Google is just horsing around.
lucm, indeed.
I followed the link and skimmed quickly, just to look at pictures. After the initial image of the upcoming products, there is a sweet ass picture of a phone that looks like it wipes the floor with all competitors. Unlike a lot of crap out there, it appears they left enough space in the case to fit in a real battery, and it has physical buttons too! Win/win. Finally, there's going to be be good phone hardware on the market! I was getting excited.
Then the caption explains that it's the G1, the first Android phone. The best-looking product on the page is the one the author hates the most, and apparently Google too since you can't buy anything like that anymore.
Fuuuuuuuuck....
(To be clear, I was just judging the book by its cover. I'm not saying the G1 has a great processor or enough storage or anything like that. I'm just saying that it looks like an outstanding case compared to anything you can get from Google, Apple, Samsung, etc.)
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