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I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up

I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great. I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force. Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. (Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)

donatj 5y ago
I suspect it’s structural, and that Apple has a lot more levels of internal design critique — in everything top to bottom. Google seems more loosely linked and in most things seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Naturally, otherwise how to justify PWA vs ChromeOS vs Fuchsia vs Flutter vs JetPack Compose.
  - EvilEy3 5y ago
    You just listed 5 unrelated teams that have nothing in common. What's you point?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Oh but they do, each of them wants us to write apps and devices with their OS/technology stack. Lets see which one of them wins out the Google political wars on the long term of Google Attention Span (TM).
      - ywoski 5y ago
        Eh kind of but you are mixing the OS with the application framework to make it look like more things exist. PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three. PWAs, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose. Of which I think PWAs rightly exist alongside a native solution. Flutter is sort of the odd one out and not sure where it will be long term. Although it's becoming more clear Fuchsia is probably going to be for IoT devices, so I could see Flutter being used as an application framework for them (which IMHO makes a lot of sense.)
        coldtea 5y ago
        >PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three. I don't think the parents point is that all those are frameworks. Rather that they have two many frameworks and platforms, with no coherent unified platform strategy (Apple's iOS, macOS, ipadOS, watchOS are all the same under the hood, and their UI frameworks are also unified or getting there fast).
        willtim 5y ago
        I always thought Dart/Flutter was a hedge against Oracle shutting down Java-usage on Android. Now that they have Kotlin (which devs generally much prefer over the Java-facsimile Dart) and Jetpack, I'm not sure either what relevance Dart/Flutter has to Android.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        It has the relevance that many Google teams prefer it to Kotlin, hence internal politics. Jetpack Compose is clearly a counter movement from Android team. https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-i-o-2021-92f0fcbd7ef9 https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-... https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0328610EN/the-my-bmw-app-new-features-and-tech-insights-for-march-2021 https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T032861... https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embedded-system-interfaces/ https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embe... https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-make-stadia-controller-setup-better-for-users/ https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-mak... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-screen-foldable/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-scre...
hnzix 5y ago
The wiggly sperm play progress animation is incredibly distracting. UI should never obtrude on the actual content.
- baybal2 5y ago
  It feels to me an improvisation upon Clearlooks
- nahuel0x 5y ago
  The sperm progress bar is the very definition of a jumping the shark moment.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hesarenu 5y ago
I feel in general Android UI is vastly better than Apple. Apple had a better ui before Material design came into picture.
- tux1968 5y ago
  Would be nice to hear a practical example or two in order to understand from where your opinion springs.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    I don't have much experience with iOS products, but I recall early in smartphone history being flabbergasted by the lack of basic affordances like a notification bar, or quick settings (eg to switch wifi on/off). I'd imagine both UIs are vastly different now, so I don't think that these examples are directly relevant. But I heard so much in those days about how iOS's UI was vastly superior and was so shocked by my first introduction to it, that I remain baseline skeptical of claims that it's objectively better than Android. People just seem too blinded to realize that their personal preference isn't a universal measure of quality. (This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI") As far as picking practical examples, my lack of familiarity with iOS means some of these may be obsolete, but some obvious ones that come to mind: 1) Is iOS multitasking still as poor as it used to be? Eg, are split-screen apps on the iPhone still impossible? 2) Are homescreen widgets still impossible on iOS? 3) Are you still forced to open (eg) app links with lower-quality off-brand apps like Apple Maps, or can you set your preferred app the first time you open a link of a certain type? I'm not even going very far afield here, as I'm only picking things that a) I know iOS had a feature gap in at some point and b) I would trip over at least weekly were my OS to have these issues. I'd imagine that one could do a little research and come up with more such examples (as well as examples where iOS's UI is superior to Android's).
    - hesarenu 5y ago
      This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI" - heh. This is not the first time i am saying in this forum. But before ice cream sandwich Android UI was plain ugly. I am not talking about UX or other features. But with Material design they have a better UI and even better UX as well. Apple was always known for it UI but that not mean you take that as a fact instead of evaluating it as time goes by.
mponw 5y ago
My guess is they want to avoid any signals of dominance. It's not that they cannot afford to look stylish. The question was probably "how modern or innovative do we want to look?" and the answer something like: "let's better lay low for the next years with all the public scrutiny and the risk of a breakup". Microsoft has employed the same strategy for years, IMO.
slver 5y ago
> Apple can do it Apple is still slowly recovering from its iOS7 moment, so not a great example.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  I disagree; I believe Apple is a great—if not the best—example at the company-scale we speak of. Apple has goofed many times, but on the whole, their design philosophy has been both consistent and excellent. Apple typically gets certain new UI paradigms wrong, but doesn’t flub design on the whole: typography, spacing, white space, colors, animation, etc. With all that said, it is difficult to speak purely objectively about design, so our opinions very well may differ completely reasonably. The best we can get are some large studies with statistical usability results, but, I admit, it’s easier to simply be handwavy. :)
  - slver 5y ago
    Apple may be the best example, but to me iOS7 remains a huge shift to shocking mediocrity they're still recovering from. They're good, but they used to be better. Alas.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Ive has gone, and there's been a notable uptick in the workability of product designs and (more subjectively) in visual coherence. Ive did best under Jobs. There were numerous disasters when Jobs was no longer around to keep Ive on the rails, including iOS7, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the clunky first few iterations of Watch itself. Big Sur is more Fisher-Price than it could be. Visually it's not a classic, but it's also better that mediocre. But the new iMacs are probably the best iMacs ever, without the backward references and very visible Design™ of the post-Jobs Ive years.
      - slver 5y ago
        Analyzing the contribution of particular individuals gives us no insight here. Sure, iOS7 definitely happened because Forstal was fired and Ive put in charge. But Ive didn't personally design any of iOS7, he was guiding others. Apple just purely politically decided to reject everything they've done up to that point and bite more than they can chew, in precisely the same way Apple NEVER DOES, and other companies, like Microsoft with Vista or Windows 8 for example, often do. This was very uncharacteristic for Apple, and yes the aftermath is still present to this day. We're at iOS15 almost, and they're still scraping bits of shit that hit the fan in iOS7. Also macOS is turning uglier by the minute.
blondin 5y ago
thank you. same experience on mobile here. i was on my phone and skimmed more than half the article before giving up and admitting it's actually unreadable and that i have no idea what great new thing they were trying to present. this is somehow baffling.
izacus 5y ago
To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you. That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  I disagree. You really have to appreciate the scale of Apple’s efforts, and look beyond iOS, which everybody always gets fixated on. This is much broader than “I prefer how iOS looks”. Their documentation, hardware, software, marketing, audio communications, videos and commercials, stores, clothing, packaging, etc. exude consistency and extraordinary care to visual design. Apple’s design is pervasive and truly their identity. As I said elsewhere, they’re not perfect, but I’d claim with enough effort and without any logical gymnastics, we could measure this vague idea to be at least an order of magnitude greater than Google’s.
  - thanatos519 5y ago
    Indeed, Apple's consistency and care are incredible. I hate their Fisher-Price products, and I wish Google would stop trying to out-Fisher-Price them.
  - izacus 5y ago
    I work extensively with Android and Apple iOS/macOS (as part of mobile development and simply as a user of hardware) and I think your claim about Apple is pretty much disconnected from reality. As soon as you step outside the marketing veneer, there's plenty of Apple that is really far from "pervasive" of their "identity". Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up. I feel you're just buying way too much into the Apple marketing schtick.
    - reikonomusha 5y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Apple sells tangible goods. Google is a middleman selling online ad services. Apple's customers are consumers. Google's customers are advertisers. Do advertisers care about Google's choice of colors and shapes. Google only needs to be effective at one thing: selling online ad services. Without advertising revenue the middleman is doomed. Not true for companies, like hardware vendors, that sell products (instead of giving them away as a means to enable more collection of data about users, who will be the targets of online ads).
mhoad 5y ago
The corporate arm of Google has some seriously strange Scientology style vibes about it and I think that is a big driver naturally in their approach to design. If you go and read the material design docs for example, this isn’t my full time area of expertise but I don’t see anything controversial in there and there is no way in hell that they haven’t tested the hell out of it from every possible angle but the outcome is honestly kind of soulless. My actual full time area of expertise is in running A/B tests and I’ll be the first to say that the link between “good aesthetics” and what actually works is much weaker than you might expect. See Amazon for another clear example.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. While people selling design languages like to pretend that they are objective, design is largely aesthetics which is largely subjective. IMO, Google is consistently far better than Apple, which consistently, at least since the iPhone era, has come off visibly trying to hard (though recently less so than in the over-the-top skeumorphism period.)
- piva00 5y ago
  Design isn't just aesthetics... Design is interaction, is taking care of how responsive this or that action can be, it's much more about HCI than on how things look like. You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design, you can't say that Google is consistently far better than Apple in overall design, you might prefer Google's aesthetics but design as a whole I can't really agree with you.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design No, I’m not; aesthetic preferences are not limited to the visual, and preferences and relative importance of all the elements you identify are within the scope of subjective aesthetic preference. Though grandparent who I was responding to was focussed entirely on the visual—their whole criticism of Google design was: “...end up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.”—so if I was focussed, even exclusively, on the visual aspects of design in my response it would have been appropriate in context.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    The latest Chrome on MacOS has absolutely murdered the old Chrome desktop. There are now pointless circles around the quicklinks. You can customise the colours but you can't fully customise them, so the best you can get is a weird palette that doesn't look how you want it to look. It's sort-of usable if you set up some custom wallpaper, but that takes a while to load, and while it's loading the page glitches with the original colour scheme on grey. The experience was fine as it was. Now it's somewhere between irritating and infuriating.
moshmosh 5y ago
> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is. (Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible) [EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.
- saurik 5y ago
  Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me to click on at this point?" I just automatically click the wrong thing every time. Like, there is even a dialog that pops up in one of the loops I often get caught in with a "cancel" button that seriously cancels my attempt to cancel something, which my brain just can't wrap itself around fast enough :(.
  - moshmosh 5y ago
    I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.
daanluttik 5y ago
I have always preferred the cleanness of android over thr imho weird ui design of iOS. I get that people loved the hardware esthetics of iPhones over android phones but not the software esthetics. At least nog since material design started. The weirdness of ios having to put blur on everything rather than just having one clean background color. The weird need to have everything be a rounded rectangle with gradient. And Id also give android the lead in whitespace use and a slight edge in font.
andrekandre 5y ago
Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. google's chat ux disaster would say otherwise...

donatj 5y ago

I suspect it’s structural, and that Apple has a lot more levels of internal design critique — in everything top to bottom. Google seems more loosely linked and in most things seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

pjmlp 5y ago
Naturally, otherwise how to justify PWA vs ChromeOS vs Fuchsia vs Flutter vs JetPack Compose.
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  You just listed 5 unrelated teams that have nothing in common. What's you point?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Oh but they do, each of them wants us to write apps and devices with their OS/technology stack. Lets see which one of them wins out the Google political wars on the long term of Google Attention Span (TM).
    - ywoski 5y ago
      Eh kind of but you are mixing the OS with the application framework to make it look like more things exist. PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three. PWAs, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose. Of which I think PWAs rightly exist alongside a native solution. Flutter is sort of the odd one out and not sure where it will be long term. Although it's becoming more clear Fuchsia is probably going to be for IoT devices, so I could see Flutter being used as an application framework for them (which IMHO makes a lot of sense.)
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out). So really it's three. I don't think the parents point is that all those are frameworks. Rather that they have two many frameworks and platforms, with no coherent unified platform strategy (Apple's iOS, macOS, ipadOS, watchOS are all the same under the hood, and their UI frameworks are also unified or getting there fast).
        willtim 5y ago
        I always thought Dart/Flutter was a hedge against Oracle shutting down Java-usage on Android. Now that they have Kotlin (which devs generally much prefer over the Java-facsimile Dart) and Jetpack, I'm not sure either what relevance Dart/Flutter has to Android.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        It has the relevance that many Google teams prefer it to Kotlin, hence internal politics. Jetpack Compose is clearly a counter movement from Android team. https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-i-o-2021-92f0fcbd7ef9 https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-... https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0328610EN/the-my-bmw-app-new-features-and-tech-insights-for-march-2021 https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T032861... https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embedded-system-interfaces/ https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embe... https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-make-stadia-controller-setup-better-for-users/ https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-mak... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-screen-foldable/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-scre...

hnzix 5y ago

The wiggly sperm play progress animation is incredibly distracting. UI should never obtrude on the actual content.

baybal2 5y ago
It feels to me an improvisation upon Clearlooks
nahuel0x 5y ago
The sperm progress bar is the very definition of a jumping the shark moment.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hesarenu 5y ago

I feel in general Android UI is vastly better than Apple. Apple had a better ui before Material design came into picture.

tux1968 5y ago
Would be nice to hear a practical example or two in order to understand from where your opinion springs.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  I don't have much experience with iOS products, but I recall early in smartphone history being flabbergasted by the lack of basic affordances like a notification bar, or quick settings (eg to switch wifi on/off). I'd imagine both UIs are vastly different now, so I don't think that these examples are directly relevant. But I heard so much in those days about how iOS's UI was vastly superior and was so shocked by my first introduction to it, that I remain baseline skeptical of claims that it's objectively better than Android. People just seem too blinded to realize that their personal preference isn't a universal measure of quality. (This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI") As far as picking practical examples, my lack of familiarity with iOS means some of these may be obsolete, but some obvious ones that come to mind: 1) Is iOS multitasking still as poor as it used to be? Eg, are split-screen apps on the iPhone still impossible? 2) Are homescreen widgets still impossible on iOS? 3) Are you still forced to open (eg) app links with lower-quality off-brand apps like Apple Maps, or can you set your preferred app the first time you open a link of a certain type? I'm not even going very far afield here, as I'm only picking things that a) I know iOS had a feature gap in at some point and b) I would trip over at least weekly were my OS to have these issues. I'd imagine that one could do a little research and come up with more such examples (as well as examples where iOS's UI is superior to Android's).
  - hesarenu 5y ago
    This paragraph is mostly in response to the fact that the GP comment is so downvoted for saying "I prefer Android's UI" - heh. This is not the first time i am saying in this forum. But before ice cream sandwich Android UI was plain ugly. I am not talking about UX or other features. But with Material design they have a better UI and even better UX as well. Apple was always known for it UI but that not mean you take that as a fact instead of evaluating it as time goes by.

mponw 5y ago

My guess is they want to avoid any signals of dominance. It's not that they cannot afford to look stylish. The question was probably "how modern or innovative do we want to look?" and the answer something like: "let's better lay low for the next years with all the public scrutiny and the risk of a breakup". Microsoft has employed the same strategy for years, IMO.

slver 5y ago

> Apple can do it Apple is still slowly recovering from its iOS7 moment, so not a great example.

reikonomusha 5y ago
I disagree; I believe Apple is a great—if not the best—example at the company-scale we speak of. Apple has goofed many times, but on the whole, their design philosophy has been both consistent and excellent. Apple typically gets certain new UI paradigms wrong, but doesn’t flub design on the whole: typography, spacing, white space, colors, animation, etc. With all that said, it is difficult to speak purely objectively about design, so our opinions very well may differ completely reasonably. The best we can get are some large studies with statistical usability results, but, I admit, it’s easier to simply be handwavy. :)
- slver 5y ago
  Apple may be the best example, but to me iOS7 remains a huge shift to shocking mediocrity they're still recovering from. They're good, but they used to be better. Alas.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Ive has gone, and there's been a notable uptick in the workability of product designs and (more subjectively) in visual coherence. Ive did best under Jobs. There were numerous disasters when Jobs was no longer around to keep Ive on the rails, including iOS7, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the clunky first few iterations of Watch itself. Big Sur is more Fisher-Price than it could be. Visually it's not a classic, but it's also better that mediocre. But the new iMacs are probably the best iMacs ever, without the backward references and very visible Design™ of the post-Jobs Ive years.
    - slver 5y ago
      Analyzing the contribution of particular individuals gives us no insight here. Sure, iOS7 definitely happened because Forstal was fired and Ive put in charge. But Ive didn't personally design any of iOS7, he was guiding others. Apple just purely politically decided to reject everything they've done up to that point and bite more than they can chew, in precisely the same way Apple NEVER DOES, and other companies, like Microsoft with Vista or Windows 8 for example, often do. This was very uncharacteristic for Apple, and yes the aftermath is still present to this day. We're at iOS15 almost, and they're still scraping bits of shit that hit the fan in iOS7. Also macOS is turning uglier by the minute.

blondin 5y ago

thank you. same experience on mobile here. i was on my phone and skimmed more than half the article before giving up and admitting it's actually unreadable and that i have no idea what great new thing they were trying to present. this is somehow baffling.

izacus 5y ago

To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you. That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.

reikonomusha 5y ago
I disagree. You really have to appreciate the scale of Apple’s efforts, and look beyond iOS, which everybody always gets fixated on. This is much broader than “I prefer how iOS looks”. Their documentation, hardware, software, marketing, audio communications, videos and commercials, stores, clothing, packaging, etc. exude consistency and extraordinary care to visual design. Apple’s design is pervasive and truly their identity. As I said elsewhere, they’re not perfect, but I’d claim with enough effort and without any logical gymnastics, we could measure this vague idea to be at least an order of magnitude greater than Google’s.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  Indeed, Apple's consistency and care are incredible. I hate their Fisher-Price products, and I wish Google would stop trying to out-Fisher-Price them.
- izacus 5y ago
  I work extensively with Android and Apple iOS/macOS (as part of mobile development and simply as a user of hardware) and I think your claim about Apple is pretty much disconnected from reality. As soon as you step outside the marketing veneer, there's plenty of Apple that is really far from "pervasive" of their "identity". Try straying a bit outside the most commonly used documentation pages, most commonly used customer journeys or even use macOS for extended bit of time and you'll see how your claim simply doesn't hold up. I feel you're just buying way too much into the Apple marketing schtick.
  - reikonomusha 5y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Apple sells tangible goods. Google is a middleman selling online ad services. Apple's customers are consumers. Google's customers are advertisers. Do advertisers care about Google's choice of colors and shapes. Google only needs to be effective at one thing: selling online ad services. Without advertising revenue the middleman is doomed. Not true for companies, like hardware vendors, that sell products (instead of giving them away as a means to enable more collection of data about users, who will be the targets of online ads).

mhoad 5y ago

The corporate arm of Google has some seriously strange Scientology style vibes about it and I think that is a big driver naturally in their approach to design. If you go and read the material design docs for example, this isn’t my full time area of expertise but I don’t see anything controversial in there and there is no way in hell that they haven’t tested the hell out of it from every possible angle but the outcome is honestly kind of soulless. My actual full time area of expertise is in running A/B tests and I’ll be the first to say that the link between “good aesthetics” and what actually works is much weaker than you might expect. See Amazon for another clear example.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. While people selling design languages like to pretend that they are objective, design is largely aesthetics which is largely subjective. IMO, Google is consistently far better than Apple, which consistently, at least since the iPhone era, has come off visibly trying to hard (though recently less so than in the over-the-top skeumorphism period.)

piva00 5y ago
Design isn't just aesthetics... Design is interaction, is taking care of how responsive this or that action can be, it's much more about HCI than on how things look like. You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design, you can't say that Google is consistently far better than Apple in overall design, you might prefer Google's aesthetics but design as a whole I can't really agree with you.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design No, I’m not; aesthetic preferences are not limited to the visual, and preferences and relative importance of all the elements you identify are within the scope of subjective aesthetic preference. Though grandparent who I was responding to was focussed entirely on the visual—their whole criticism of Google design was: “...end up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.”—so if I was focussed, even exclusively, on the visual aspects of design in my response it would have been appropriate in context.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  The latest Chrome on MacOS has absolutely murdered the old Chrome desktop. There are now pointless circles around the quicklinks. You can customise the colours but you can't fully customise them, so the best you can get is a weird palette that doesn't look how you want it to look. It's sort-of usable if you set up some custom wallpaper, but that takes a while to load, and while it's loading the page glitches with the original colour scheme on grey. The experience was fine as it was. Now it's somewhere between irritating and infuriating.

moshmosh 5y ago

> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is. (Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible) [EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.

saurik 5y ago
Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me to click on at this point?" I just automatically click the wrong thing every time. Like, there is even a dialog that pops up in one of the loops I often get caught in with a "cancel" button that seriously cancels my attempt to cancel something, which my brain just can't wrap itself around fast enough :(.
- moshmosh 5y ago
  I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.

daanluttik 5y ago

I have always preferred the cleanness of android over thr imho weird ui design of iOS. I get that people loved the hardware esthetics of iPhones over android phones but not the software esthetics. At least nog since material design started. The weirdness of ios having to put blur on everything rather than just having one clean background color. The weird need to have everything be a rounded rectangle with gradient. And Id also give android the lead in whitespace use and a slight edge in font.

andrekandre 5y ago

Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. google's chat ux disaster would say otherwise...