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2008 HN discussion from when the outgoing "little blue g" favicon was introduced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?

by raldi 11y ago

2008 HN discussion from when the outgoing "little blue g" favicon was introduced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211518 In it, Dustin Curtis criticizes Google (rather rightly, in my hindsight-enhanced opinion) for a Marissa-Mayeresque design process of "Make 300 logo variants with pseudorandom permutations, and then pick your favorite." Looking at those permutations now (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/SEnK37orPGI/AAAAAAAAAp4/gR3gdZ6sgbU/s1600-h/favicon_iterations.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/SEnK37orPGI/AAAAAAAAAp...) it's obvious (again, with the benefit of hindsight) that they were all very inside-the-box. Apparently nobody even considered trying a different font. This pg comment from that thread turned out to be particularly insightful, given today's news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211649

nailer 11y ago
Interestingly, the blue g favicon is still there on the front page at https://www.google.com/favicon.ico https://www.google.com/favicon.ico (cache is off).
- akvlad 11y ago
  nope, just cached https://www.google.com/favicon.ico?cache https://www.google.com/favicon.ico?cache
  - Buge 11y ago
    It must be cached somewhere within Google, since shift refresh doesn't update the old url and it's https.
    - jszymborski 11y ago
      favicons cache differently. You either need to enter a different favicon address (favicon.ico?v=2) or reload and restart the browser. I know it's weird, but favicons are weird.
      - Buge 11y ago
        But it's just an image right? Does the browser decide to treat the image different because of the format or the extension? I'm pretty sure you can use png files as favicons if you want. Anyways I tried it in IE, including restarting it and it still showed the old lowercase g.
- jtuente 11y ago
  But it's updated on, at least, www.google.ca
  - maemilius 11y ago
    Maybe it's a regional thing. I still see the old favicon on both sites.
    - carloscheddar 11y ago
      Got the new one on google.ca. Try resetting the cache.
davidw 11y ago
The new favicon is way better IMO. On the other hand, the main logo... I think this sums it up: "seem as much like a preschool as humanly possible". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153449 I'm just not a fan of extremely flat designs.
- raldi 11y ago
  Have you only been looking at them on a computer? On a phone, and especially on a watch, flat designs seem far superior to me.
- notatoad 11y ago
  Today's google doodle seems to reinforce that "as much like preschool as humanly possible" is exactly what they were shooting for here. https://www.google.ca/?doodle=22175023&hl=en&nord=1 https://www.google.ca/?doodle=22175023&hl=en&nord=1
- Ciantic 11y ago
  New favicon? https://www.google.com/favicon.ico https://www.google.com/favicon.ico - is still the old one.
  - mkagenius 11y ago
    Wondering the same. If it has changed, then ISP cache will take some time to reflect.
    - teraflop 11y ago
      If your ISP is caching HTTPS requests, you have a problem.
      - plonh 11y ago
        CDNs get copies of SSL keys so they can do their job: serving data. They are logically part of the serving infrastructure for example.com
nostrademons 11y ago
The reason they did that was so that they could build up data on the effect of each factor independently. That way, when the bigwigs get into a meeting and discuss alternative designs, they can predict "Ok, this will have $X effect on revenue but will decrease search latency by Y ms, which itself will have +$X effect on revenue." I was the first engineer on the first visual redesign that tried to change everything about the page [1]. One of our biggest problems was that since we tried to change everything at once, the metrics went haywire, and we couldn't know if a change was because we introduced a left-nav (okay, actually we kinda could, because we'd experimented with a left-nav on its own beforehand) or because we changed the line spacing or because we cleaned up the logo or because we added icons. There was effectively no way of "debugging" the user; when user behavior varied from expected, we didn't know why. I've got plenty of other stories from that era, but they aren't really fit for a public forum. Happy to discuss privately. (Kinda ironic when the non-Googler says that to the Googler...) [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-...
- pasbesoin 11y ago
  Can you offer any perspective on the whole sometimes-named "mystery meat" UI that's been rolled particularly but not only into mobile design over the past half decade? Further, more and more of this seems to have been "backported" into traditional desktop presentation design. While I will experiment around until I more or less "get it" (although I may miss finding some useful features for months), it particularly frustrates people like my parents. Mom is somewhat spatially challenged (although plenty bright in other ways), and I've had numerous calls with her where the controls for what she wants to accomplish have changed and simply bewilder her. AND, given her spatial orientation problems, sometimes we will have to have the same conversation several times -- because the rather arbitrary-appearing icons and patterns don't immediately "sink in". P.S. I mean this as a legitimate question, if it fits the parent's -- or others' -- field of experience. It seems that a lot of this design is expected to simply permeate and be picked up by osmosis. Is that really the case?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
ryandrake 11y ago
I've never understood that criticism. Business decisions should be data driven. You test new signup flows to see which one onboards users better. You test advertising changes to see which one converts better. Why should a logo design or a title bar color be any different? Without testing each iteration, how do you know which one has the best effect on whatever success metrics you're using? I can understand if you're worried about optimizing to a local maxima, but that's not a criticism of A/B testing, it's a criticism of the diversity of the available inputs.
- raldi 11y ago
  > Business decisions should be data driven. The evolutionary, data-driven approach will never yield a Nest thermostat, iPhone, Helvetica, or flag of New Mexico. We have no idea how to even begin to write a fitness function for good design.
  - blt 11y ago
    Actually Helvetica is an evolution of the 1896 typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akzidenz-Grotesk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akzidenz-Grotesk
    - raldi 11y ago
      But it wasn't designed by an evolutionary algorithm; it was designed by a genius typographer who trusted his own sense of taste.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - fixermark 11y ago
        I'm not sure where you think taste comes from besides evolution of ideas and data analysis done by black-box functions inside people's heads. Formalizing that process and using externally-collected data is just de-black-boxing something that happens in a black-box form in the professional's mind.
ricardobeat 11y ago
> Apparently nobody even considered trying a different font. That's because they were designing a favicon, not doing a rebrand. Using a different font than your logo would make absolutely no sense.
- raldi 11y ago
  Plenty of sites use a different typeface in their favicon than the one they use in their logotype, e.g., Blogger, McDonald's, Nasdaq, and Bing.
  - hanspeter 11y ago
    All of those has used an existing part of their logo as their favicon.
    - raldi 11y ago
      That's true for McDonald's, but certainly not the other three.
      - hanspeter 11y ago
        All of them has a favicon which is also a part of their logo.
        raldi 11y ago
        But all three logos were designed and introduced at the same time as their corresponding favicon. Your claim was that the favicon was just a copy of an existing part of the logo.
        hanspeter 11y ago
        Your claim was that a favicon could be a different font than in the logo. But these examples are all a part of the logos. Google would have needed to rebrand their logo to do the same.

pasbesoin 11y ago
Well, a, um, "literal" example was the initial occurrence of what I've just learned is called the "hamburger" icon/menu. Which was "backported" to Google's desktop designs. A particular instance I recall was changes to the Calendar web page presentation. Mom initially struggled a fair amount with the controls in the left bar for selecting which calendars were displayed. This was in a Google Apps environment with 20-ish people participating. I remember when screen presentations could be somewhat cryptic -- per your description as well as other instances. But, as you point out, there was usually a manual. Now? Often it seems to be down to guessing and poking around. Or asking friends. But if you are a bit older and not constantly talking over such things with your friends, that means of edification is somewhat starved. P.S. Thanks for the response. And as I said, I'm curious about the perspective of someone on "the other side". I'm not trying to be unduly critical, here; just, this is an issue I've consistently bumped up against, from my own perspective.
harlanlewis 11y ago
> That's driven by screen size - there's simply not enough screen real estate on a phone to label every button with words. It does have a legit discoverability problem, which most folks in UX acknowledge but don't know how to fix, given other constraints of the media. Some of the most effective solutions to this I've seen require solutions beyond visual representation. They address the problem through dimensions independent of viewport size and space. For example, LukeW's "Don't Divert the Train" http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1798 http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1798 moves content from behind navigation and into the user's already-occurring action stream. The button is removed entirely, as is the designer's need to consider how communicative icons are for representing actions. This requires a broader view of how features relate to each other through a design process that discovers other paths to successful behavior. Approaches like the hamburger menu, in addition to the usability issues you note, solve functional goals but have fallen out of vogue for their ineffectiveness at encouraging specific actions. Label-less icons, while attractive and convenient, suffer similar problems. As getting users successful quickly is generally an important goal (before they've internalized your app's unique visual language), the current trend of putting core functionality behind opaque symbols seems counterproductive.
- pasbesoin 11y ago
  Another thing I'm now reminded of is, on Android, the... functionalization/clickification of text. Some text is active, other is not. I don't see any visual cues that distinguish the two. I end up just poking at text, or thinking, "If I were designing this, I'd want more detail or a link to further controls." In the latter case, sometimes I find I was thinking the way the designer/programmer was, and that text does indeed lead somewhere. For someone who doesn't "think that way", this is more of a challenge. This also seems to have become more prevalent in desktop / full screen design. Stuff that doesn't look "clicky" is. I think that was one of my mother's problems with changes to the Google Calendar web page UI.
- wpeterson 11y ago
  Interestingly enough, LukeW is now doing product/design for Google.

msellout 11y ago

I'm surprised no one on the team was familiar with multivariate analysis. That's the wrong way to say it. Let me rephrase more carefully... I'm surprised no one used more sophisticated analysis techniques to allow an experiment that changes many explanatory factors simultaneously and estimates the effects of not only each factor independently but also their interactions. It's relatively straightforward statistics and would have been taught to clever undergrads or first-year grad students who specialized in math, economics, machine learning, industrial engineering, etc.

nostrademons 11y ago
There were stats Ph.Ds on the team that were certainly familiar with it, and I knew at least one former Amazonian manager that held that we were too afraid of having multiple experiments running at once and too afraid of confounding factors. (Amazon's A/B testing is much more traditional split-testing, where they show one variant to half the population and one to another half and then pick the best one.) The biggest problem is that many of the folks involved had encountered very surprising and counter-intuitive interactions between features, and because of that, they didn't trust the textbook models. For example, at one point we had a very convenient embedded-Python experimentation framework that let us rapidly try things out. Our main data-scientist on the project decreed that we were not to use it, because a number of the externalities that framework introduced - higher latency, and potential error conditions - could confound the metrics in ways that were not well-understood at the time. Data is useless unless you can trust that it actually represents reality. Stats textbooks all make certain assumptions about reality when they present the models, and if reality doesn't conform to the assumptions, the models won't conform to reality. Certain factors were well-studied enough that we could build useful models from them - that was the point of all the experimentation around color, after all. (I wonder if those conclusions still hold, anyway: data has an expiration date, and I recall personally running an experiment that directly contradicted an experiment Marissa Mayer had run 6-8 years previously.) But that requires a lot of hypothesis testing and verification: it's never a matter of "well, the model says so, therefore it must be", but rather "well, the model says so, let's run an experiment to see if the model's predictions line up with reality, and if they do, we have a pretty strong - but not ironclad - indication that we can use it for future calculations." tl;dr: Largest and best-funded social science program I've ever seen.
- hueving 11y ago
  >Largest and best-funded social science program I've ever seen. You should check out Facebook. There emotional manipulation studies are horrifying, but they certainly have access to many more person hours of time and collected data than Google does on end users.
- paganel 11y ago
  > tl;dr: Largest and best-funded social science program I've ever seen. I don't want to sound like a hater and I'm very well aware of the fact that some design choices might have affected the company's revenues, but all this discussion involving very smart people discussing what, from a very "outsider-ish" perspective, seem like trivial issues (the color of the letter G, for example) reminds me of Herman Hesse's "Glass Bead Game". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game#Plot)