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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

>Google takes this even further: all of their UI decisions are made statistically.

I like how the author scoffs at this as if it is self-evidently preposterous, yet Google is one company whose UI design elegance is consistently competitive with Apple's.

I can't think of a single UI design choice in Safari that I prefer over how Chrome does it.

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I like how the author scoffs at this as if it is self-evidently preposterous,

Have you used gmail lately? The new UI is a mess.

Android 4, too. I think their shift to using only icons everywhere (in Android and their websites) was terrible. I have no idea what most of the icons are supposed to do until I tap them, which is a terrible way of navigating an interface.

>I have no idea what most of the icons are supposed to do until I tap them, which is a terrible way of navigating an interface.

Is that such a terrible way for things to be though? To me, a well designed interface is one that invites you to play with it and learn its ins and outs, while making the experience memorable so that you'll find your way more easily in the future. It's best for the interface to be informative while doing this, but if you spray text all over everything, it does impede exploration.

They added a preference to get text in the buttons instead of the cryptic icons, which is a huge usability improvement.

I still don't like it as much as the old gmail.

They added a preference to get text in the buttons

I hadn't realized - thanks. It makes a difference.

I still want the old look back.

In addition, I think they completely failed with the HD themes, too. Some of them have such a contrast difference that you cannot even read label captions anymore, i.e., the complete left part below the Inbox becomes essentially useless...

I'd argue that it's less of a mess than Mail.app in Lion.

Dunno - I'm still using 10.6.

I don't have anything _against_ Lion, just that I hate upgrading unless I really need to.

Well, it's just like jwz's rant on FF vs Safari. Mail.app is not as good, no doubt about it. It lacks almost everything a mail client should be able to do. But it works, does it's job quickly and easily and then is out of my way. I wish Thunderbird was the same way, but it just isnt.

Google's UI is competitive with Apple's in elegance? That's an interesting perspective; obviously, I don't agree.

I think it's kind of silly to argue Google v. Apple on elegance, yeah. But to my eye, Chrome really is a lot more elegant than Safari. There are a billion things Chrome does to make browsing quicker for me, not just because of raw browser speed but because things are just so graceful, simple, and direct. Just being able to search within a URL by starting to type the URL and then hitting 'Tab' is golden to me, and saves me a huge amount of time every single day.

Yeah, it's subjective, and of course the way one works doesn't exist in the world of Platonic forms but is a function of the tools one uses.

EDIT: So, therefore, it's very difficult to make claims across toolsets. I am an Apple/Emacs guy from back in the Stone Age, so what I think of as "elegant" is going to be very different than someone who has a different history. YMW truly V.

Well I should qualify that by saying that I mean the Apple of today vs. the Google of today. Apple's design has slipped considerably – just look at Lion, iTunes, more recent versions of Safari, or the latest UI for the Apple TV. But if we were talking about Apple ca. 2009, Apple would easily win in any contest of UI design.

Ah, I obviously took the good juju with me when I left.

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