Google is an Eng. driven company that excels at UI when it can be resolved to 'speed' and 'minimalism'. Speed is an easy thing for Eng. to understand you don't

Google is an Eng. driven company that excels at UI when it can be resolved to 'speed' and 'minimalism'. Speed is an easy thing for Eng. to understand you don't even need to tell them to do it, they will start to optimize wether you want it or not, like dogs to the bone. To this day 'delivered in 0.6 seconds' appears in Search. Minimalism is the poor man's design choice - which is good - it forces UI to focus on the essential. This is why early Google interfaces were kind of ugly, but so hyper utilitarian we did not care. But minimalism does not help if you're facing an existentially tricky interface with a high degree of irreducible complexity - i.e. there is simply too much information. At this point you need good UI design which is founded upon a culture of UI design and has to be supported right from the top. Nobody with hard power at Google seems to speak this language so is there hope? Design is also often a matter of opinion - and making some tough choices on behalf of your users which can be hard. Apple does this in order to get rid of a lot of clutter, you just don't see stuff that might be useful. And there are some choice disasters ... if you're using Chrome and logged in, and using YouTube - you might notice you are using '3 accounts' at the same time - the top right corner will have your 'Chrome' id, and YouTube has multiple Id's within an account, I've been using YT for years and have no idea what that is. ... and in the new Gmail I've accidentally archived a load of emails because of the 'magic buttons' that appear here and there floating over your inbox. The list goes on of course.