Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google's designers are almost as good at design as Equifax is at security.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Enough of modding comments, I want to be able to mod this fucking awful summary and article out of existence...
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.
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.