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This article made me finally bite the bullet and convert. I've been using the new design for the last several hours. I happen to have a window open with the o
by pg 15y ago
This article made me finally bite the bullet and convert. I've been using the new design for the last several hours. I happen to have a window open with the old design, so I know it's not merely my imagination that the new one is worse. Not enormously so, but definitely worse.
Read mails are more legible in the old version, because there is more contrast between black letters and the old light blue background than between black and the new gray.
It's also harder to parse the list of emails visually in the new design. In the old one, the 3D checkbox acted like a bullet point, and the name of the sender was closer to it. Now the heavy checkbox has been replaced by a faint square, and the sender's name is about 2x further away from it. So scanning my email is no longer like scanning a bulleted list. It's just rows of text.
That's a big deal functionally. There's a reason bulleted lists exist as a format, and removing the bullet points from the average bulleted list would make it significantly less legible.
It's a bummer to see Google making things work worse in order to make them look better (or worse still, more consistent). That's the sort of thing big companies do. Which I suppose Google now is. But they had at least been trying not to act like one before.
- statictype 15y agoor worse still, more consistent So you believe that consistency among UI screens should take a backseat to usefulness? I agree with this but I know there are a lot of people who believe the opposite - that consistency is more important to good design. And this isn't limited to big companies.
- damncabbage 15y agoConsistency is only a means to an end. That end can be a net positive, but I think pg is alluding to consistency for the sake of Google's convenience, rather than the convenience of its users.
- j_baker 15y agoI'd argue that a consistently poor interface is preferable to an inconsistently well-designed interface. I can get used to a poorly-designed UI if I only have to learn how to do so once. It's when I have to learn different ways to do the same thing that it becomes annoying.
- bane 15y agoThere's different kinds of consistency though. Make everything use the same palette? That's a kind of consistency. Make everything use the same interaction design? That's a kind of consistency. Years ago I had to use a piece of visualization software that was designed around consistency in the interaction model for the software. It sounded nice, but what it meant was that where there was intersection in the interaction models between visualizations it worked well, but where there were differences they either chose to just not implement that function, or bury it in some menu somewhere. It was infuriating to know that a particular kind of visualization should offer a certain feature (like finding the average on an axis of a scatter plot), but because some other completely different visualization (a semantic graph) didn't have such a concept they just simply left it out.
- stan_rogers 15y agoThis almost exactly matches not only my complaints, but the feedback I gave when Google claimed to be interested in such things. Another thing I've observed is that non-expert users are utterly confused by the various actions not being visible (though greyed out) when documents are not selected—they simply assume that they will never exist and don't see them after a selection is made. I can't see any way in which the new design is as good as, let alone better than, the old.
- bane 15y agoIt took me fully 5 minutes to figure out where the "create a filter" option was since I couldn't figure out the magical combination of what to select when to make it appear. Very annoyed.
- gleb 15y agoI think the reason is simpler - Larry Page is in charge now. His approach is to trust the designers not users. And that approach results in products designers like and users don't. See http://vimeo.com/29965463 http://vimeo.com/29965463 for discussion on how things have changed in Google w.r.t design.
- potatolicious 15y agoThere's nothing intrinsically wrong with designer-first UI. After all, none of the points pg pointed out are engineering related. The problem here is that there is still a confusion between graphics designers and interaction designers. A lot of companies let the former do the job of the latter, and it shows.
- gleb 15y agoWhat I am saying is that new Google design is not a pathology of a large company, but a result of a single executive decision. Before red primary buttons would have failed testing. Now this testing is simply not done. New way is faster. An intriguing possibility is that Larry knows they are producing garbage, but thinks it will work out long term, like Android.
- adgar 15y agoYou seem to have an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Google's product design, well beyond that of an average software engineer at Google like myself. I'm curious how you came to be in possession of such insight, since it apparently surpasses my own as a lowly Google employee.
- jacoblyles 15y agoIn the new design, controls are links instead of buttons. It's harder to find them, as they stand out less. Also, I miss the use of colors to delineate between elements of a different kind. In the new version, they only use light and dark.