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What is going on at the Google design team? The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations. Finance, Calendar, Mail ... all getting new

What is going on at the Google design team? The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations. Finance, Calendar, Mail ... all getting new UIs, and all of them are worse. Giant whitespace, low information density, a sluggish webapp feel,...just what is going on? The new GMail struggles to keep up with clicks in any browser - while the previous version was snappy. How on earth is this possible?

dragonwriter 8y ago
> The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations Quality is subjective and perhaps they are improving for a target audience that is not you.
- hedora 8y ago
  UI quality is not subjective; decades of research have gone into quantifying user interface quality, and also into proving that the resulting metrics reflect reality. Dismissing this entire field of work is like saying “Structural integrity is subjective. Bridges gotta fall eventually, and geology is hard, so why bother?”
  - abadaba 8y ago
    But quality criteria is subjective on an individual basis. Individuals place varying weights on aspects of a user interface. Some prefer speed over aesthetic, some prefer whitespace over information density, etc. The quality criteria among one demographic may differ from the quality criteria among another. So I think it’s safe to say that a company can optimize its UI quality for a certain demographic, and that demographic may not include certain individual users.
hedora 8y ago
Ignoring the aesthetics, they’re breaking basic workflows. For instance, try rejecting a calendar invite with a response. I guarantee you’ll screw it up the first time. Something similar happened with windows phone. Version 8’s UI was painstakingly optimized to minimize the number of taps to get anything done, and all the controls were at the bottom of the screen. (I guess market research showed that people use fingers to control their smartphones, and not some other appendage.) In 8.1, they increased the number of taps for most interactions. For instance, in 8.0, you opened maps, typed your destination and pressed enter. It popped up an interstital screen with options that timed out after 5ish seconds of no interaction, and then started navigating. This was infuriating, but still well beyond the current state of the art. If I remember right, in 8.1, you had to wait for networking, click through the screen, wait again, and click OK, just like on current iOS (except that the controls on iOS can’t be used one handed, so you get to have zero hands on the wheel instead of one). Also, even in the broken revamp, it was obvious what was tappable, and what was not. Google has taken regression of basic workflows to a new level with their new ui revamp. For instance: Clicking “no” in a calendar invite brings you to a confusing form with no useful information and a bajillion user interface elements. You need to click a low contrast text box that says “invite guests / tldr” to type a repsonse, and then click a button. Of course, there is no visual indication that the “invite guests...” text is an editable text box until you click it. Typing your response and clicking no doesn’t actually do anything until you click the red button in the top left of the screen. The only way I’ve found to discover this is to attempt to close the calendar UI. I have never attempted to use the new calendar UI workflow on a phone. I suspect it is even worse. The fact that Google is dysfunctional enough to ship things like this boggles the mind. Even Apple, which is supposed to be good at this stuff, is years behind defunct competitors in easily quantifiable, obvious metrics.
foepys 8y ago
> How on earth is this possible? I'd put some huge blame on single page applications. Nearly everywhere stuff gets replaced by SPAs to push all layout calculations to the client. This frees up resources on the server side but at the same time everything feels sluggish and takes a long time to load (network- and Javascript-wise). Reddit is also taking this new approach and as a result is nearly unusable on my phone and takes 3 times a long to load on my desktop. The layout is becoming mobile first due to everything needing to be "responsive". So the desktop as the minority webbrowsing platform gets to use all the interfaces that are primarily optimized for mobile.
- 9a5351b7-c78e 8y ago
  They're doing the SPA wrong.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Does anyone do it right? Gmail used to be a rare example of a non-dreadful SPA app, but I gather the new one is pretty bad (I’m still on the old interface for now). Beyond that, I can’t think of many. The dreadful new Jira is a good example; much, much slower than the old one, less information dense, and more confusing.
- trendia 8y ago
  Luckily, their CEO has learned the power of public relations trick to use so many words to say so little: > There is always that change aversion. We believe everybody has a home on Reddit. The challenge is finding that home, particularly for new users. Helping them find their home, helping find their community and sense of belonging on Reddit, it’s something we’re not very good at. The redesign is a big effort towards making that better.
nannePOPI 8y ago
design isn't something "objective", so it's where they usually put the worst candidates that they were forced to hire. This gets worse when companies grow bigger because the hiring is done by people quite far from the product

dragonwriter 8y ago

> The quality of their work is, at best, worse than previous iterations Quality is subjective and perhaps they are improving for a target audience that is not you.

hedora 8y ago
UI quality is not subjective; decades of research have gone into quantifying user interface quality, and also into proving that the resulting metrics reflect reality. Dismissing this entire field of work is like saying “Structural integrity is subjective. Bridges gotta fall eventually, and geology is hard, so why bother?”
- abadaba 8y ago
  But quality criteria is subjective on an individual basis. Individuals place varying weights on aspects of a user interface. Some prefer speed over aesthetic, some prefer whitespace over information density, etc. The quality criteria among one demographic may differ from the quality criteria among another. So I think it’s safe to say that a company can optimize its UI quality for a certain demographic, and that demographic may not include certain individual users.

hedora 8y ago

Ignoring the aesthetics, they’re breaking basic workflows. For instance, try rejecting a calendar invite with a response. I guarantee you’ll screw it up the first time. Something similar happened with windows phone. Version 8’s UI was painstakingly optimized to minimize the number of taps to get anything done, and all the controls were at the bottom of the screen. (I guess market research showed that people use fingers to control their smartphones, and not some other appendage.) In 8.1, they increased the number of taps for most interactions. For instance, in 8.0, you opened maps, typed your destination and pressed enter. It popped up an interstital screen with options that timed out after 5ish seconds of no interaction, and then started navigating. This was infuriating, but still well beyond the current state of the art. If I remember right, in 8.1, you had to wait for networking, click through the screen, wait again, and click OK, just like on current iOS (except that the controls on iOS can’t be used one handed, so you get to have zero hands on the wheel instead of one). Also, even in the broken revamp, it was obvious what was tappable, and what was not. Google has taken regression of basic workflows to a new level with their new ui revamp. For instance: Clicking “no” in a calendar invite brings you to a confusing form with no useful information and a bajillion user interface elements. You need to click a low contrast text box that says “invite guests / tldr” to type a repsonse, and then click a button. Of course, there is no visual indication that the “invite guests...” text is an editable text box until you click it. Typing your response and clicking no doesn’t actually do anything until you click the red button in the top left of the screen. The only way I’ve found to discover this is to attempt to close the calendar UI. I have never attempted to use the new calendar UI workflow on a phone. I suspect it is even worse. The fact that Google is dysfunctional enough to ship things like this boggles the mind. Even Apple, which is supposed to be good at this stuff, is years behind defunct competitors in easily quantifiable, obvious metrics.

foepys 8y ago

> How on earth is this possible? I'd put some huge blame on single page applications. Nearly everywhere stuff gets replaced by SPAs to push all layout calculations to the client. This frees up resources on the server side but at the same time everything feels sluggish and takes a long time to load (network- and Javascript-wise). Reddit is also taking this new approach and as a result is nearly unusable on my phone and takes 3 times a long to load on my desktop. The layout is becoming mobile first due to everything needing to be "responsive". So the desktop as the minority webbrowsing platform gets to use all the interfaces that are primarily optimized for mobile.

9a5351b7-c78e 8y ago
They're doing the SPA wrong.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Does anyone do it right? Gmail used to be a rare example of a non-dreadful SPA app, but I gather the new one is pretty bad (I’m still on the old interface for now). Beyond that, I can’t think of many. The dreadful new Jira is a good example; much, much slower than the old one, less information dense, and more confusing.
trendia 8y ago
Luckily, their CEO has learned the power of public relations trick to use so many words to say so little: > There is always that change aversion. We believe everybody has a home on Reddit. The challenge is finding that home, particularly for new users. Helping them find their home, helping find their community and sense of belonging on Reddit, it’s something we’re not very good at. The redesign is a big effort towards making that better.

nannePOPI 8y ago

design isn't something "objective", so it's where they usually put the worst candidates that they were forced to hire. This gets worse when companies grow bigger because the hiring is done by people quite far from the product