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Comment by drivebyacct | Hacker News Reader

It's beautiful hardware and beautiful software. I'll take functionality any day though.

This is the divide. I have two geeky friends. One is OCD and well dressed. He likes things to work smoothly and look good. He is very happy with his iPhone and is excited to upgrade. My other friend is like me, he loves to hack and is a fan of Google's services.

Google needs to put Matias Duarte to work. Gallery3D is beautiful, there's no reason those GUI elements couldn't be more standard/accessible to the avg dev.

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> "He likes things to work smoothly and look good. He is very happy with his iPhone and is excited to upgrade. My other friend is like me, he loves to hack and is a fan of Google's services."

Can we not have both? I don't buy the dichotomy that a hacker-friendly device must be jerky and ugly. IMHO what Android lacks is integration - the odd fusion of hardware and software that Apple seems uniquely able to pull off. With the exception of the Nexus One (for probably obvious reasons), every Android phone I've used feels very discretely disconnected between software and hardware.

Oh I didn't mean to imply that we can't have both. I completely hope that Matias (the UI/UX guy from Palm that everyone juices over) can come in and beautify android.

Google seems to have problems hanging on to top design talent; Doug Bowman's post on leaving Google, and on the culture at the company, was rather revealing for me on that point.

I think you misunderstood my point. Matias Duarte is "famed" UI guy that just left Palm/HP's WebOS team for Google's Android team.

I'm not sure about Google's ability to retain talent... but I'm hopeful that Matias can bring Android some UI/UX love.

And I think you misunderstood my point: it seems likely that Google simply does not value design talent all that much, and thus that the way to improve Android UI is not simply to hire talented designers, but rather to completely change that aspect of Google's corporate culture.

OK, what did I do? When Doug Bowman left Google he wrote a rather revealing critique of their attitude toward design, and the general disregard for it in their corporate culture:

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Given that, is it really all that unreasonable to point out that Google's UI problems probably are not going to be solved by one person, no matter how much the general community likes him (after all, Bowman's pretty well-loved in the design community, and look what happened to him)?

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