Google Design’s Best of 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Google Design’s Best of 2019

design.google

71 pointspwatsonwailes64 comments

I was the engineering leader for a grounds-up rebuild of a user dashboard this year. For the people who use it, it's part of how they make their living.

The process of working with design was the most user-hostile experience I've ever seen. There was quite a bit of "users don't know what they want" thrown around when people saw the beta and complained. It was used quite selectively, geared towards things the designer disagreed with. When the dashboard left beta, it was universally panned. All our KPIs tanked. What's more, it was considered a success because "redesigns are always poorly received." At all the jobs I've worked at, I've yet to discern any true rules that designers follow that aren't rationalizations.

I bring this up because nothing about this site...from its design to its content...resonates with me. If this is truly the best of 2019 then designers REALLY need to take a long, hard look at their culture.

Well, it’s stuff that Google did in 2019 that it wanted to highlight, so take "best of" with a grain of salt.

I’d be interested in a similar list from an independent perspective that doesn’t skew so high concept. Any improved login flows, transit ticketing experiences, accessibility wins, etc?

For another recent example, check the complaints about the latest redesign of the once-great Weather Underground app on Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wundergrou...

If memory serves, this app used to have a 4.5+ rating, now it's down to 3.2.

I did find the old 5.10.1 version of the app with a search for "download wunderground android", so I installed that and have a usable app again. Until they make some server change that breaks it.

Pocketcasts' redesign is another good example. It's at 3.3 and used to be almost unanimously positive.

I have had a similar issue with a UX/design person. I think the main problem though is process. The design person should be challenged and accept criticism, and revisit their designs. Engineers can also fall into similar traps of following trends and over-engineering things (smart people like to make complex things without even realizing it). Without the structure in place to correct these oversteps, designers can have similar problems.

"Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." quoting a smart person here.

The interesting thing for me isn't that some people use motivated reasoning to push through changes for which they have a personal preference, but that the people who do this sometimes manage to gain power within organizations and insulation from consequences. You see the same pattern in engineering sometimes.

Do you work at Google, or is this just a blanket denouncement of all designers and their artsy-fartsy, latte-sipping ways?

UX Designer (at Google) here. I feel your pain. For any design to work, it needs to be grounded in a firm understanding of the user's behavior. I agree that design intuition is limited by one's own view of the world, so it's critical to gather the right data before going further than speculative designs. This can be accomplished through a variety of means, but observation and qualitative interviews prior to "design" are usually effective.

The design should be validated with different users from the same cohort prior to building it. Functional prototypes work well here. Ignoring user feedback here is a huge mistake on the part of the designer. Design is relatively cheap, and it's easy to iterate and check your assumptions with users before anything is set in stone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this step would have increased trust with your engineering team. Often due to ignorance, some designers don't appreciate how much effort goes into these builds, and how early architectural decisions shape the product in ways that make it difficult to change later.

Acknowledged, that this is a "perfect world" scenario and business pressure might require augmenting the process. An experienced designer would understand how to do this and still get meaningful results.

From the very first line of the article:

"The mantra “focus on the user and all else will follow,” is always top of mind here at Google"

Please excuse me if I find that shockingly difficult to believe. Google is one of the most user-hostile of all the large tech companies. I'm genuinely surprised they even had the audacity to write that.

They left out an important part; it's "focus on [monetising and tracking] the user", and that's precisely what they are doing very well.

I can only assume you are talking about interacting with Google, the company. I've never succeeded in getting any humans attention in Google, and I suspect that very few people who don't considerable sums with them have managed it. It is indeed like dealing with a gigantic, uninterested, stonewalling, machine.

However, the article wasn't about that. It was about their UI design techniques. When I remember the clusterfuck that was the early versions of Android, I'm truly amazed by how far they have come. Comparing Android Auto to what the car manufacturers provide is literally night and day. The car's native interface is cluttered with distracting detail and a profusion of buttons and controls, whereas the navigation in Android Auto seems stripped down to the bare necessities - just what you need to know. Yet they both have the same feature set, so Google has managed to squeeze the functionality into a UI so simple a single glance at the screen while tells you what you need to know - and not much more.

Google Sheets on Android is to my mind a simply stunning achievement - the pinnacle in UI design. I only discovered it when a desperate situation forced me to use sheets in desperation on the phone. Anyone whose used a speadsheet on a PC knows they support a large variety of ways of interacting with them by dragging, right clicking, highlighting and so on, and despite all that need a large menu at the top for the things not covered. How on earth could you translate that to a tiny screen that can't distinguish between scrolling and dragging? It seemed so hopeless I didn't bother to look for years. Yet when I did look not only did they managed to include almost all of the functionality of the desktop version in a tiny fraction of the space - they made it all discoverable as well.

There is no way this is just luck, or the inspired work of a single man. They had to have employed the engineering techniques like he those described and probably many more besides - rapid iteration, testing many ideas with feed back from multiple groups of users.

Now back to dealing with Google the company. Despite all this good work, Google Sheets (both desktop and Android versions) has a flaw - in some circumstances it can't add up. 1+1=3 is a pretty bad flaw in a spreadsheet. (It's not as simple as that obviously, but it comes up with the wrong result and yet if you export it to say Excel or Libre Office, they get a different, and correct result.) But I don't pay for it, so do you think there is some place I can report this? Absolutely not. They are frustratingly hopeless in some ways.

Google calendar is bad, thought, especially since they removed the ability to hide early morning hours. Nothing in my life happens between 00-08. Why can I not hide it? Because some designer said so.

Now I just use thunderbird. Much better than Gmail/gcal.

I wonder what the thought process behind putting character design like that in this post was. I find them utterly repugnant.

Combined with the color scheme (and as others have noted, page performance), I'd vote this for worst design of 2019.

The page looks like https://i.imgur.com/RqWJb7Q.png for more than 20 seconds until it finishes loading and then just keeps on downloading more and more and more data (400MB and counting). Pardon me if I ignore their ideas about design.

That "A Space for Being" room, you know we need in our lives? More mirrors.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

> Avoid enormous network payloads Total size was 64,215 KB

The total size if you don't do anything on the page is already bad, but it's also different than if you actually try scrolling. Scroll down to the bottom and watch what happens.

Also lol at them having the gall to give their desktop page a 97/100 and then saying "Use video formats for animated content. Estimated Savings: 42.57s"

42.57s!

And then once you've reached the bottom of the page (and assumed that page is loaded in full) scroll back up. It just keeps loading that data again and again

I love how Google punishes above the folder render blocking in their speed tests, but can't even get it right internally. I've had so many clients complain about render blocking because of Lighthouse, and it take so much time to explain why that isn't always a problem, and sometimes is required when you're using certain js or js libraries.

Supposedly Chrome is testing a splash page for sites that shows average speed test grades, I'm sure they'll whitelist their own products.

Does a 9 megabyte .gif with horrible artifacting count as good design? Asking for a friend.

If one isn't good, surely having many of them will improve the situation.

400MB and counting

To put that into perspective, that's about 37 minutes of uncompressed CD-quality audio, 20 minutes of high-quality 720p H264 video, or a full installation of Windows 98SE. All of which I think offer far more content for the size than this page.

That said, at least the page is still readable with JS and CSS off, unlike a lot of other pages-turned-into-apps I've seen.

I only count 67 MB, with cache disabled an no add-ons.

Same for me if I don't do anything on the page. But then if I actually scroll the page it gets exuberant. I think it's loading the same assets many times in parallel and possibly repeatedly. Also, "only", lol.

Look at this hilarious bucket of shit: https://i.imgur.com/36CBn5y.png And that's in Chrome!

Firefox actually handles this page's bullshit gracefully, by saying "NO! FUCK OFF, WEBPAGE!" ("Will-change memory consumption is too high. Budget limit is the document surface area multiplied by 3 (730032 px). Occurrences of will-change over the budget will be ignored.")

In all fairness, you probably have the "disable cache" box checked in your developer tools. If you turn that off, the multiple duplicate requests in the network tab go away. Presumably the duplicates get served from cache.

Of course it would be better if they didn't make duplicate requests in the first place!

Yeah it works out OK with caching. Very easy to track down with the new initiator tab on the in Chrome Dev Tools. They have _initLightBoxItems which removes all the images/gifs from the dom and then readds them which is bound to the scroll event (with a 50ms throttle).

67MB is big for a webpage.

Not only that, they swap in a fancier font after it loads which has slightly different text sizes. This causes everything to jump around as you're reading it. Wasn't the whole FOUC issue known by designers years and years ago?

It jumped around 2 seconds into load for me, and I'm on reasonably fast WiFi less than 100mi from Google HQ!

I only counted 64 MB, but still this page took 3.18 minutes to fully load according to my Firefox devtools.

Try scrolling the page in Chrome (https://i.imgur.com/36CBn5y.png)

The whole gestures thing, besides a few handy ones, requires such a specific set of circumstances (flip the phone over, turn it the right way, make the gesture) to make them workable they are mostly forgotten about.

In general, it's just simpler to press the button.

This is a constant struggle in design, even (especially) when targeting highly technical audiences. We frequently conflate the familiar with the simple or user-friendly. People will shout "how intuitive!" when a designer repeats an interface that's currently familiar in a context that forgets why the original interface was helpful.

So we get a few nice touch gestures: scroll, zoom, etc. We then expand adding more until learning all your gestures (on that particular os for that particular hardware) is more complex than ASL.

This seems a lot more like an ad for their products or ideas than a breakdown of great examples of practical designs. I was hoping for examples I could learn from.

I don't know what the graphic style is called but I despise it. How is that type of drawing not something anyone can do? Honestly. Unless these drawings are done by children they are horrible, if they are I apologize and feel bad. I think Box.com or Dropbox used similar graphics early on.. apple had some going with apple.com/today but they have moved along.

I totally agree I find this drawing style of goofy-looking characters with weird proportions that is going through so many tech companies right now so confusing. I hate it.

The "big bodies, tiny heads" style seems exactly the opposite notion of what you'd want to convey with a tech company too[1]. It's like the exact opposite of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi_(slang)

[1] Unless it's some sly reference to "smart technology, dumb people"?

I honestly think it's done to look more "whimsical" and "accessible" and to dodge any sort of accusation of discrimination or exclusion. Which isn't a bad thing at all. Just the art style is so weird and blobby.

It's called pretentious. It's an attempt to appear to be working on a higher level by deliberately discarding aesthetics and what would commonly be thought of as good design. A sort of purposefully ugly. It was a trend in fashion for a while and sadly it looks to have bled over into places like Google in a desire to be hip.

To me it just looks like bad 4chan memes and trying too hard.

Ew, you weren’t kidding. I haven’t seen anything like these elsewhere, luckily. They’re really off-putting.

>“A Space for Being” explored neuroaesthetics, the field exploring how design impacts our biology and emotions

no arguing about impact, i feel it just by looking at the picture. Being GenX, I'm probably older than the target demography (and the ones who designed it), and that is probably why the impact on me has different sign - it looks to me in a disturbingly unnerving way like a hybrid of prison cell and operating room from dystopias where mind control/altering procedures are performed.

Gotta love that Page Speed Insights score of 57/100 on mobile.

Maybe some of the HN Google employees can explain why AMP wasn’t used for this slow page?

So, wait, this enormous page doesn’t even load on mobile and exists to self promote its own designs?

Thanks. I hate it.

For me, everything coming out of Google seems to be like a robot trying to be friendly. Cold, insipid and uncanny.

The page doesn’t finish loading on mobile

A page that talks design in one of the worlds biggest companies - has drawings that looks like they're made from children.

Great, but the reason is obvious. It's to not offend anyone. That is the key of making modern art 2019, design and art that makes even the most grumpy SJWs happy.

The modern euphemism for that is "being inclusive" --- where quality matters no more.

More seriously, some of those drawings seem more like they belong in an article about obesity.

From the colors and font I thought it was a Dropbox landing page at first

This is a good summary of Google.

Self-righteous, convinced to be the best. A page full of awards to themselves that barely loads making it de facto the worst design ever.

Hilariously enough this page would not work in Chrome on Android. Scrolling was totally broken. Firefox Preview worked perfectly though so I got to read it at least.

Android 10 and Chrome here, site works great.

I take it Youtube didn't make the cut.

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