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Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their pr

Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their products is marred by UI inefficiencies, clutter, or inconsistency.

jmduke 13y ago
* They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all.* Regardless of how you feel about how it turned out, they clearly have spent the past two years focusing on unifying design and UX across their products.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  One of the worst sins of UI is "unification". It's helpful to have meaningfully consistent metaphors and themes across applications. For the UNIX / Linux commandline, that's processes and pipes, BSD and GNU argument flags, and the like. There are various competing keyboard accelerator schemes: emacs, vi, Wordperfect keyboard templates, DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x/NT, Apple's Mac hotkeys, GNOME and KDE.... There are fundamental layout, font, and color palette schemes. But one of the worst overall design features I see is taking a given scheme and applying it without regard to suitability across a wide range of applications with a wide range of use cases. For Google this results in the insanity of persistent browser elements occupying 25-30% of vertical screen real estate in Gmail, Groups, Book search, and other products. When the workaround is for me to either push my browser window half-height above my viewable monitor frame and drag down the bottom of the window, to be able to present my work front and center, or to open the elements inspector and delete elements from the DOM just to be able to see the relevant work, something's very, very wrong. Microsoft of course was infected with similar idiocy with its modal, non-resizeable dialogs and wizards. Even GNOME, for all its UI/UX brain death, generally provides for resizable dialogs, and allows text to be copied from its error pop-ups (under Windows the only recourse was and to the best of my knowledge remains screenshotting the damned thing). But ... Google and UI/UX? Not so much.
  - watwut 13y ago
    The worst thing for me is that they design for big screens and I have small one. Even when you pick up compact scheme. The record was stats screen on blogger which shown me 3cm of information panel and the rest was taken by huge sticky !mostly empty! top and bottom rows. Way to go, really.
    - davedx 13y ago
      You see that everywhere, unfortunately. I'm on a 2012 Macbook Air, and the Bootstrap documentation's sidebar navigation doesn't fit in the height of my screen. If that doesn't demonstrate how hard it is to get responsive web design right, I don't know what does!
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      Ironically: I've got a reasonably large screen (1920x1080), but with a 16x9 aspect ratio, height is constrained. The physical size of the display is fairly small, so px-specified layouts (particularly for fonts) are often painfully small.
  - spb 13y ago
    You can actually hit CTRL+C when a Windows dialog is focused to copy the text of the window.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      I haven't made any real use of Windows in over a decade. I know that functionality didn't exist as of WinXP and probably later. When was it added / where do you see it?
      - ygra 13y ago
        This goes back to at least XP, if not 2000. You don't see it since you're just pressing a hotkey and get something in the clipboard. In the same way you would make a screenshot which is also not a visible operation per se.
kaoD 13y ago
Google Search pretty much nailed UI.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  It's rapidly in the process of un-nailing it. Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation. I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious. Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-classes of search: ⚫ Google Books. Particularly the Ngram viewer. My frustrations with the company have reached a point that I hate to admit I love any of its products, but I love Google Books search and the Ngram viewer specifically. GBS makes serious amends by having one of the most spectacularly useless and annoying interfaces for actually reading online content. Contrast with the Internet Archive's book reader, which is a thing of joy, beauty, grace, and perfection: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/mode/2up http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/... ⚫ Google Scholar. I'm not aware of any other resource which has comparably deep coverage of research papers. Again, what the search interface giveth, the content interface taketh away, with the same online reading interface as Google Books, in the rare cases where journal publishers of recent content actually make full text available. ⚫ Date refinement. If DDG offered this my use of Google Search would fall by another 50-75%. Being able to search within specific bounded ranges of time is hugely useful. ⚫ Maps, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Mostly OpenStreetmap though "maps.google.com" is still tied to my muscle memory. Streetview remains tough to beat. ⚫ News, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Twitter's actually pretty good for breaking stuff, with search. Reddit isn't bad as a filter either. I've also got a few conventional news sources (NY Times, Guardian) on my rsstail feeds. ⚫ Financial data, though there are lots of alternatives. This is an area rife with perverse incentives, however, and for the data I'm typically interested in, research tools such as FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis), Wolfram+Alpha (despite its complete and utter lack of a definitive syntax), and upstarts such as Knoema and Gapminder are promising. I believe this period is actually showing signs of being a renaissance in advanced online data analysis and access tools. Increasingly though, Google's my 2nd or 3rd tier search destination.
V-2 13y ago
I wouldn't say so. With Chrome they practically redesigned web browsers. "Clutter" is what they were before.
- tomp 13y ago
  Chrome, as Google Search (google.com main page), was very well-designed at the start. From there, it only went downhill, as soon as the marketing people interfered.
  - V-2 13y ago
    What are you referring to? If I recall, it hasn't really changed a lot, other than minor things such as replacing the wrench icon with a hot-dog
    - tomp 13y ago
      You mean Chrome? That's just because they weren't left with a lot of elements that they could change (most of Chrome is really minimal). However, the welcome page/new tab page has gone through some really bad iterations (app store, Google+, search box, ...) that removed most of the minimalism and simplicity.
      - V-2 13y ago
        OK I could have missed New Tab changes, because I override it with an extension (Speed Dial 2), I never liked this bit
hrjet 13y ago
I would say Google's design sucks today. Their websites were much more usable before the UI makeover. I guess the focus of the new UI is to make it appear shiny and vibrant and spacious at first glance. But it has come at the expense of usability.

jmduke 13y ago

* They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all.* Regardless of how you feel about how it turned out, they clearly have spent the past two years focusing on unifying design and UX across their products.

dredmorbius 13y ago
One of the worst sins of UI is "unification". It's helpful to have meaningfully consistent metaphors and themes across applications. For the UNIX / Linux commandline, that's processes and pipes, BSD and GNU argument flags, and the like. There are various competing keyboard accelerator schemes: emacs, vi, Wordperfect keyboard templates, DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x/NT, Apple's Mac hotkeys, GNOME and KDE.... There are fundamental layout, font, and color palette schemes. But one of the worst overall design features I see is taking a given scheme and applying it without regard to suitability across a wide range of applications with a wide range of use cases. For Google this results in the insanity of persistent browser elements occupying 25-30% of vertical screen real estate in Gmail, Groups, Book search, and other products. When the workaround is for me to either push my browser window half-height above my viewable monitor frame and drag down the bottom of the window, to be able to present my work front and center, or to open the elements inspector and delete elements from the DOM just to be able to see the relevant work, something's very, very wrong. Microsoft of course was infected with similar idiocy with its modal, non-resizeable dialogs and wizards. Even GNOME, for all its UI/UX brain death, generally provides for resizable dialogs, and allows text to be copied from its error pop-ups (under Windows the only recourse was and to the best of my knowledge remains screenshotting the damned thing). But ... Google and UI/UX? Not so much.
- watwut 13y ago
  The worst thing for me is that they design for big screens and I have small one. Even when you pick up compact scheme. The record was stats screen on blogger which shown me 3cm of information panel and the rest was taken by huge sticky !mostly empty! top and bottom rows. Way to go, really.
  - davedx 13y ago
    You see that everywhere, unfortunately. I'm on a 2012 Macbook Air, and the Bootstrap documentation's sidebar navigation doesn't fit in the height of my screen. If that doesn't demonstrate how hard it is to get responsive web design right, I don't know what does!
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    Ironically: I've got a reasonably large screen (1920x1080), but with a 16x9 aspect ratio, height is constrained. The physical size of the display is fairly small, so px-specified layouts (particularly for fonts) are often painfully small.
- spb 13y ago
  You can actually hit CTRL+C when a Windows dialog is focused to copy the text of the window.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    I haven't made any real use of Windows in over a decade. I know that functionality didn't exist as of WinXP and probably later. When was it added / where do you see it?
    - ygra 13y ago
      This goes back to at least XP, if not 2000. You don't see it since you're just pressing a hotkey and get something in the clipboard. In the same way you would make a screenshot which is also not a visible operation per se.

kaoD 13y ago

Google Search pretty much nailed UI.

dredmorbius 13y ago
It's rapidly in the process of un-nailing it. Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation. I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious. Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-classes of search: ⚫ Google Books. Particularly the Ngram viewer. My frustrations with the company have reached a point that I hate to admit I love any of its products, but I love Google Books search and the Ngram viewer specifically. GBS makes serious amends by having one of the most spectacularly useless and annoying interfaces for actually reading online content. Contrast with the Internet Archive's book reader, which is a thing of joy, beauty, grace, and perfection: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/mode/2up http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/... ⚫ Google Scholar. I'm not aware of any other resource which has comparably deep coverage of research papers. Again, what the search interface giveth, the content interface taketh away, with the same online reading interface as Google Books, in the rare cases where journal publishers of recent content actually make full text available. ⚫ Date refinement. If DDG offered this my use of Google Search would fall by another 50-75%. Being able to search within specific bounded ranges of time is hugely useful. ⚫ Maps, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Mostly OpenStreetmap though "maps.google.com" is still tied to my muscle memory. Streetview remains tough to beat. ⚫ News, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Twitter's actually pretty good for breaking stuff, with search. Reddit isn't bad as a filter either. I've also got a few conventional news sources (NY Times, Guardian) on my rsstail feeds. ⚫ Financial data, though there are lots of alternatives. This is an area rife with perverse incentives, however, and for the data I'm typically interested in, research tools such as FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis), Wolfram+Alpha (despite its complete and utter lack of a definitive syntax), and upstarts such as Knoema and Gapminder are promising. I believe this period is actually showing signs of being a renaissance in advanced online data analysis and access tools. Increasingly though, Google's my 2nd or 3rd tier search destination.

V-2 13y ago

I wouldn't say so. With Chrome they practically redesigned web browsers. "Clutter" is what they were before.

tomp 13y ago
Chrome, as Google Search (google.com main page), was very well-designed at the start. From there, it only went downhill, as soon as the marketing people interfered.
- V-2 13y ago
  What are you referring to? If I recall, it hasn't really changed a lot, other than minor things such as replacing the wrench icon with a hot-dog
  - tomp 13y ago
    You mean Chrome? That's just because they weren't left with a lot of elements that they could change (most of Chrome is really minimal). However, the welcome page/new tab page has gone through some really bad iterations (app store, Google+, search box, ...) that removed most of the minimalism and simplicity.
    - V-2 13y ago
      OK I could have missed New Tab changes, because I override it with an extension (Speed Dial 2), I never liked this bit

hrjet 13y ago

I would say Google's design sucks today. Their websites were much more usable before the UI makeover. I guess the focus of the new UI is to make it appear shiny and vibrant and spacious at first glance. But it has come at the expense of usability.