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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.
Those who cannot read or wish to further glorify the stupid.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
And they all looked pretty ugly to me, bar possibly the VR/AR headset.
The new Pixelbook is sadly bad.
Step 1: Convert the keyboard into an easel by hyper-opening the device
Step 2: Place the "easel" part keys-down on the table
Step 3: ?
Step 4: Spill your tea on the table and have capillary action wick it up into the Pixelbook keyboard
Step 5: !@#$*!@!
...That's me, propheting...
Is Material Design the thing where I can't tell which part of the screen is a button and which part isn't? I loved webOS, but the whole "everything is a uniform color with no way to tell what is what or how to interact with it" is one of the dumber design ideas for computers.
"[We'll be] really getting inside your head and making it an unpleasant place to be" -- Trent Reznor
Apparently you haven't used the docs.google.com interface; it's a real piece of shit, somehow they managed to do worse than Apple & Canonical.
Has anyone involved in this puff piece article looked at Gmail in the past several years?
They call "Material", but it's the same unicolor as other companies. I.e, icons with no meaning (triangle for back, square for home... or circle for home?), no color, no underline to indicate clickable text (nor buttons), no border or shadow to help you to identify a window, no text to help and lack of shortcuts for the advanced users, extensive use of light text color in white background, no way to customize a thing. Appears that the cool in modern design is just ignore every HCI rule that was build in the last 40 years.
This. I thought I was reading Wired from back in the day just now.
Is this a joke?
I know this may just sound like old-man-curmudgeon speak, but many of their products were much better in the earlier days. Maps is the most dramatic example. The new maps, once MBA-types took over it, runs considerably slower and has a worse UI than the original maps.
The earlier android versions were also much better looking, much better looking than the recent flat-ui idiocy.
and their new Youtube beta, you would think otherwise. The UX experts.. sigh..
There are 4 articles of shovelled Google crap on the front page in just the most recent 8 articles here.
The site was more enjoyable to read 10 years ago when the stories were about independent advancements ...
Not wall-to-wall Google, Apple, Amazon, electric cars, driverless cars articles mixed with the occasional Slashdot-inappropriate political article.
Google's designers are almost as good at design as Equifax is at security.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Cautionary tale: if you get righteously drunk with aliens, you richly deserve the soft, colorful, delightful anal probe you will not remember completely, save for the faint reckoning that your drinking is perhaps getting out of hand.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"The stuff Google showed off 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."
I'm speechless...
Enough of modding comments, I want to be able to mod this fucking awful summary and article out of existence...
this guy
Yep, so great at design that they can’t design a non-malfunctioning button.
No. Google is HORRID at design.
We have 4 different chat apps (voice, hangouts, allo, duo), 2 different map apps (waze and google maps), two different forms of email (gmail and inbox) and so on and so on. And it doesn't always integrate cleanly. I want to use hangouts as my dialer all the time, but by default it opens up my system dialer on android. I can use sms via hangouts, or google voice, or its own messaging app.
It's a fucking mix mash of well designed widgets.
You mean that floating action dick in the lower right hand corner of your screen, right?
they're so good that there's an extra option in android to mark wtf is actually a button area.
at least now I know why presented to the user android features have been going downhill while some technical aspects have gone a lot better. also the look is stupid now and things take more presses/swipes to do and user is bombarded with popups - and user protection features had not been tested in common use cases by actual common people.
google added this feature where if theres an UI overlay you cannot approve of permissions for an app - and the approve permission screen gets dismissed if you turn off the app. this is a problem because using the fb faces for example makes it so that if an app wants a permission you want to give to it.. you have to first close that fb face. that is easily done just 1 swipe, but it means that you need to find again in the app the permission trigger to grant it, or dive into the menus to grant it, because the screen to grant it is already gone if you close the offending app.
why this is stupid? the decision to make it was made by a stupid person because the permission granting dialog should be a separate screen that other ui overlay apps cannot overtake. and fyi they didn't immediately see it as a problem when they rolled it out as a nerfed feature to approve/disapprove per app.
look, the basic idea is just the same as why windows goes to that separate screen to allow admin rights for an application. should just have copied that. technically they could have. very easily. they control the window manager which controls the overlay applications.
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 and how we should do everything like them...
how do you know an experienced android developer from a newbie? a newbie will argue that something should be done in some way because google tells to do it in that way. an experienced one knows that google also tells to do it the other way and also sometimes says that don't do it the old way without telling the new way. also a slightly experienced one will know that some of googles class wrappers are longer than just writing to use the classes directly anyways while there isn't any kind of a functional difference.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It was one thing to unify, but turning everything to paper was a step backwards.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Samsung is the worlds biggest seller of phones, Google isn't even in the top ten. Even if you consider just the market segment their Pixel phones are released into, they don't sell well compared to the competition. Honestly they're ugly half plastic things, and the "clean" "pure" interface lacks functionality. User buy other peoples stuff not Googles.
Their tablets? They sold practically none. They need multi-window support, Google simply copied Windows without even thinking if its the best solution for touch. Apple implemented something far more sensible and intuitive in the iPad Pro, Apples tablet market share is up, the market says Google are wrong and Apple are right.
Many of their newer services are impossible to use. Take Google maps, the Android one on a device without touch.... how do you zoom out? There isn't a way. You can zoom in, but you cannot zoom out, it's only supported by pinch touch interface and without touch it cannot be done.
Consider the back button on Android, people want to close apps, so apps implement back button as close. Google steadfastly refuses to implement a close-this-app system, and so everyone back-back-back-confirm close-ok, to exit. Millions of apps know this, billions of users know this, yet Google refuses to fix this shortcoming in the design.
I go to Google.com, it pops up a dialog asking me to login, that dialog obscures another one that asks me if I want to change to english.
Maps, editing a map and using a map are different sites. To edit it you clink the link to switch to maps.google.com..... as if anyone knows that till they discover it by accident.
Google Play currently won't update any apps on my device. "Can't update app.... error code 495". I am supposed to visit their website for this error code! Their link requires I accept Chromes terms and conditions, but I use Firefox. Why doesn't it just tell me the error? Why a code number? Police use code numbers so people don't know what they're talking about, Google use 495 for what???
So many times I get forced to use Google and I don't want to, they are a failing market incumbent trying to secure their place, the new Microsoft.
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.
Remember what Microsoft attempted 15+ years ago with .Net: a single codebase and programming paradigm for multiple devices and media?
That's how countless ASP.net web developers have no idea about what happens client-side versus server-side, since they are used to simply double-click on the control and write C# or VB.Net code in the event method; the widgets themselves take care of those details like ajax or win32 api. We've seen this horrible approach leak in the NodeJS world, with things like MeteorJS where you have to check the isClient variable to know if you're client or server-side... not so different from isPostback in Asp.net. Interestingly, MeteorJS also has isServer, because as we all know, the only thing better than a boolean variable is two boolean variables with opposite meaning.
Well, Material Design is yet another take on this. One framework to rule them all, from things that can fit on your wrist to things that are bigger than your parent's first TV. Mission accomplished: it's terrible everywhere.
lucm, indeed.
You know what I miss the most from 10 years ago? The discussion about the year of the Linux desktop.
Think I'm kidding?
With phenomenal new distros, swelling international support, and a little extra momentum from Dell, we think Linux is poised to exploit the current atmosphere of doubt surrounding Vista and pick up serious traction in '08. 'For end users here in North America, Linux poses a low barrier to entry. While many still balk at an upgrade to Vista (typically centered around cost and restrictive licensing terms), those who are curious about the open-source alternative will find few of these obstacles. And an increasingly rich array of ready-to-run software (not to mention surprisingly effective utilities that let you run many Windows apps) makes it easy switch.
https://linux.slashdot.org/sto...
which reminds me of a quote from Bill Gates: "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
lucm, indeed.
Spot on. And they must be new here, otherwise they could have ended the summary with "Discuss." and at least it would have been worth a chuckle.
lucm, indeed.
Why is a fluff piece about appearances on a site "for nerds?"
And you are one of those people who see everything as black or white (I think the technical term for that is "being immature")
lucm, indeed.
Considering it's the same person who wrote the article about apple being bad at design. I can't stop thinking that there's a bias to these both articles and can't see a productive discussion.
Everything google touches gets harder to use the more they touch it, and they ignore completely absolutely all feedback from users. Otherwise explain G+ whitespace.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, that would be severe colour blindness.
Yeah, but they're great at PR.
Why do a company wide drive to have better design when you can give some tech journalist a goody bag in return for him writing an article gushing about how you 'finally get design'?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
This is a three paragraph opinion piece on the front page that IÃ(TM)ve now skipped over. I come to /. because it gives a quick glimpse into interesting tech news, not to read some guyÃ(TM)s full opinion about googleÃ(TM)s design capabilities.
Another questionable slashdot UX choice is that when you paste smart quotes, emdashes, endashes etc into a slashdot comment field it displays them as gibberish like Ã(TM) rather than displaying them correctly or automagically converting them to their ASCII safe equivalents : ", - or '.
Now you may say "That's because Slashdot uses UTF-8 rather than some Microsoft proprietary encoding!". Except it doesn't - not much outside ASCII actually works.
You can work around it by pasting your comment here
https://dan.hersam.com/tools/s...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
What the fuck is this garbage? google haven't gotten better with design they have gotten a 1000 times worse. Android is not an example of google design, it is a success despite the horrid design and inconsistent user experience.
I'm not sure I trust any commentary on design from a website that's so utterly fucking shit in its presentation of its content.
That's a horrific web page!
Anyway, the original Google.com was beautifully designed - "All the while, they've stubbornly kept the Google homepage concise and pristine." --https://www.wired.com/2003/01/google-10/
n/c
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It really is a shame that someone hasn't broke all 10 of your fingers.
Why just the fingers?
I really like this article is designed. It generates a lot of feedback and it's really interesting as I know Google is very important company and I should read up on what they are doing to keep ahead of the curve.
Is this a joke posting or what.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
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.)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Same for Apple ever since Jony Ive took over all design duties. The man has no expertise in ergonomics and his ego is too big for him to be wrong.
excuse me? good at design? Have you actually SEEN what they presented? none of that actually looked any good, just like their chromecast which looks awful.
Sorry but if there's one thing google's bad at, it's design.
I emphatically disagree. The products Google introduced are uniformly ugly (particularly the Pixels). That follows with the hideousness that is "material design".
From where I sit, Google is terrible at design.
Compare Google maps and Bing maps. The UX on Bing maps is vastly superior. Same for Bing images.
You may be the same person I replied to last time I asked this question but ... Are you high?
Google is trying to migrate to CTRL-Shift-I
By trying to migrate to you mean has been using since it's inception right? It also makes sense. There are multiple developer shortcuts that land you in different places, all Ctrl+shift+something. Why should one suddenly be F12 (which still works might I add). Frankly I'm happy I can bring up the developer console on my laptop without reaching for the function shift key.
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?
The problem that the previous place was retarded for something only developers look at when you have a dedicated developer toolbox.
All that was needed in terms of features and capabilities was already present in Firebug years ago.
Yep, and bloody hard to find at the time too. Your problem is you got used to something and someone moved your cheese.
I think it worked, the MSFT stock is soaring.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q...
(look at the 5-day chart)
lucm, indeed.
the Ikea of software.
Ikea sells cheap chinese crap just like walmart, but with better marketing. So they're more like Apple than google.
lucm, indeed.
Duarte was right: Google is really bad at design. And design at Google got much worse once Duarte took the helm. Material design is a major step backwards for user interfaces: gratuitous animation is freaking annoying, and adds pointless latency, which incurs cognitive cost.
I'm not sure, but farhad's point might be that even if you don't have a clue what the Persian says, you can still figure out the UI. That's not quite true for me (the three large buttons(?) at the bottom don't seem to do anything), but it is an interesting idea. Hieroglyphics, I mean icons, almost never help me figure out a UI, and I like text. But perhaps for some purposes (maps, for example), one could build an a-lingual UI that would actually work. (Google Maps is not that UI.)
"A fuzzy little donut you can have a conversation with." Where I come from, donuts are for eating. Unless they're fuzzy, in which case it's time to throw them in the trash. And I would much rather have a conversation with my wife, or my children, or any other human.
I agree with virtually everyone else here; Google is Terrible at design.
And for the record, the author flunked Topology 101; that thing is not homeomorphic with a donut.
Jony Ive hasn't been in charge of "all design duties" for a few years now. Richard Howarth is the head of Industrial Design, Alan Dye is the head of User Interface. They do all the product design duties.
Compare Google maps and Bing maps. The UX on Bing maps is vastly superior.
Based on what? Google Maps has a more minimalist UI so that you can see more of the map, and you can click on objects (i.e. buildings, houses, monuments) to get their information (i.e. Address, coordinates, address block). Bing shows hardly any buildings at all, doesn't show ANY houses, and what few it shows are only occasionally clickable. Bing doesn't have any information (i.e. hours, menus, etc) about most businesses, its traffic data pales in comparison, and zooming in and out is also much slower.
Furthermore, research shows that flat UIs (like the one Bing Maps uses) make users work 22% slower on average than UIs that provide depth (like what Google uses)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
That alone shows a crappy UX. But let's take this further:
Google also allows you to look around buildings in the 3-space, even allowing you to zoom all the way out and see a webgl rendering of earth. This also works in almost every national park (even smaller ones) where you can see the mountain terrain in three dimensions, and better yet, the resolution in these areas at the closest zoom level is way better than what Bing provides. Google also maps all of the major trailheads and landmarks in even the less famous national parks, whereas Bing rarely does (look up hidden valley natural tunnel at south mountain national park for example; compare what you find with bing vs what you find in Google...Bing throws you to some place in Virginia.)
You're going to have to describe pretty well how Bing Maps comes anywhere close to being as good as Google Maps in terms of UX, and there's no way in hell that Bing is equal, let alone better. And Bing Maps looks like a retarded stepchild compared to Google Maps in terms of features.