5 ms·

I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?

• defen 16y ago
  More that their design in the past 4-5 years (both visual and "user experience") is very bad. It also does not seem to be practiced in the traditional way (based entirely from reading blog posts and with no first-hand experience with how they do things).
  • sfphotoarts 16y ago
    Google design statistically, like evolution, except the variations being tested are not random (well, maybe some might be). I would disagree with you that their products are not well designed. Of course they have many products, but the majority that I use are a step above their competitors.
  • RyanMcGreal 16y ago
    It's a mixed bag. For example, I thought Chrome was very well designed.
    • defen 16y ago
      Good point - for some reason I was only thinking of their web products. Chrome is excellent.
  • qq66 16y ago
    The products were designed to achieve financial objectives. They have been of mixed successes in this regard. Nobody was designing them so that commenters on the Web would say their "user experience" was good.
    • defen 16y ago
      I'm saying they may have had more success if they'd focused on those things explicitly. Great design and financial objectives are not mutually exclusive - see Apple iAnything. Of course it's an unanswerable question whether more focus on design would have helped some of their failed products, but unanswerable questions are the most fun to argue. As an example, in my opinion a big reason that Wave failed was that it had an awful user experience - people simply had no idea how to operate the interface. I think there was also a marketing failure in that people didn't even know why they were supposed to use it, but that's a separate issue. When I have multiple tech-savvy friends tell me they have no idea how to even use a product from a major corporation like Google, I worry a little bit.