Don't make it "like Google" | Hacker News Reader

Don't make it "like Google"

rakhim.exotext.com

48 pointsnativeit49 comments

Not long after ads started appearing on the Web, there was research showing that Web browser users quickly learned to visually filter them out.

So, when Material Design came out, and it wasn't even distinguishing the extents of UI elements (e.g., transient UI object with same background as what it partially overlapped, with no border), it violated much of what we knew about HCI (i.e., in the interests of the user or task), and it looked like a brochure (i.e., in the advertiser's interests) more than anything else... Occam's Razor needed only to mutter the words "advertising company".

I know that some percentage of the people who have to work atop Material Design are doing good HCI despite it, but they're fighting against sabotage, and we all are dumber and less effective for it.

Material design was came after and was an improvement on "flat" design that gave almost no indication what elements could be interacted with.

What exactly is wrong with Material Design? It seems to fall in the category of "good enough", where the differences between "good enough" designs are rounding errors when compared to the benefits of standardization, consistency, and user familiarity.

Parent comment doesn't say it, but I infer one of the things that they are talking about concerns how some secondary interactable elements look indistinct from text, and only hint at being interactable if you have a cursor and hover over it. So beside a flashy CTA "Upgrade plan" might ba a "no thanks, let me cancel" interactable that looks like text

If you are a software engineer with no sense of design, do make it like Google. Material Design allows anybody to put something together that looks half decent, is somewhat consistent and familiar with users.

The irony is that engineers are too arrogant to use material, while good designers just use material.

The good designers, yes. I'm sure there are plenty of other designers who think their opinion is better than the likely thousands of person-years of UX research that the major OS vendors (combined) have invested into their interface guidelines.

For each of the major platforms, following the guidelines will at least make your app consistent with the other apps on the user's device, which is a decent-enough baseline. Going wild and re-inventing how a drop-down should look or how scrolling should work is probably just going to annoy the user.

I just think it looks ugly, and I don't want to create a product that I don't personally like. Totally open to accessibility and using existing frameworks but not Material.

Funny I like the MUI React widgets for applications that are used by people who use those applications all day for work. For consumer-oriented mobile they just seem to be meant for maximum feasible misunderstanding and then some.

What's the alternative? I feel like I read a bunch of vague critiques without anything specific.

For what it's worth, I think Google's products are far superior to it's competitors, and I've never had issues with a site looking too Google, though I've been burned by some complex SPAs that were slow and buggy.

I could not disagree more with this piece. I actually quite like Material Design. Gmail does feel like the red headed stepchild mostly because it predates Material Design by a decade, and there are still many power user settings that rely on old UI (similar to the problem Microsoft has with Windows 11 nowadays).

We can also pass off Apple GUIs as clunky and bloated by simultaneously opening every possible modal and sidebar in a manner that isn't representative of real world use, then taking a screenshot.

Every article that criticizes some general UI thing, like the general state of current user interfaces, how everything was better 10/20/100 years ago, how the start menu or settings in some operating systems are bad, ... really should be forced to provide some actual examples and analyze them in some detail. All we get in this article is a screenshot of Gmail, resized to a small size so that we don't even have a chance to decipher anything on it, and the repeated assurance of the author that this does in fact represent an unusable UI.

But even I, as someone who doesn't use Gmail, can quickly understand that interface on the screenshot after zooming in a bit. Maybe it looks a bit chaotic, but there seem to be some menus opened just for the sake of argument. Maybe this UI is incredibly powerful? Maybe they didn't dumb down the interface, which is something that is also criticized here a lot. It's hard to tell from a screenshot alone.

I feel like the article is completely unconvincing when they give GDrive as an example of bad design without going into specifics, then give Apple as an example of good design, then fail to comparatively examine how iCloud offers a better UX

> Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time.

I’ll do you one better: try making a chart in Google Sheets.

Really? It's that hard for you to make a chart in Google Sheets?

What's your preferred way? Matplotlib? Seaborn? R?

Mostly the details are a problem.

For example, adding data labels to a scatterplot. Completely insane how they want you to do it.

Or removing the Y axis from a bar chart. Have to make the text size 11 and white. Why?

There's a lot of little things like this that are just mind-numbing.

I like native PowerPoint charts (not Excel) and R's ggplot2 personally.

Would you be surprised if I told you there might be people who prefer sheets way and dislike PowerPoint and ggolot2?

These are subjective things. We can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'

We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either.

Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors."

People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions.

UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say.

</rant>

Incorrect. Making a chart in Sheets is mind-numbingly easy.

The problem comes (as you describe in a later post) if you don't just want a chart, but instead want a particular chart for a particular purpose. Not some weirdo crazy purpose, either; there are many ways to get into trouble trying to make minor adaptations.

Same thing with Material. It's great for making a bland clone of a thousand other interfaces, preferably one with only a handful of relevant interactables ("find the beige car" is hard when they're all beige). If you need to distinguish things that are different because they have a reason for being different -- say, labels and buttons -- well then you're SOL.

A curious observation. I was opposed to this article based on the title. Esp when I clicked on it and then saw it was the same author as "But what if I really want a faster horse?"

Because I assumed I knew what the argument was. I assumed this was another material ui doesn't look great -- while not appreciating the nuance of Google. Just as I assumed "what if I really want a faster horse" was actually about some anti-AI thing that just didn't appreciate how game-changing AI models are.

I pigeonholed the author based on my pattern matching of similar titles.

Then I clicked around https://rakhim.exotext.com/. Always curious about clean design. So clicked around on https://exotext.com/. Clicked on a few more blog posts of Rakim again and thought maybe they were ok. I was still a bit in pattern matching mode (stereotyping perhaps) assuming the author was like other people on Bluesky etc. Perhaps reactionary etc.

Then somehow in my clicking I saw a thumbnail of the author and I was like - oh that guy looks like me.

It's messed up it took me to this point to get there - but at least I persisted in trying to understand where they were coming from. At that point though I started to click around more and more and actually read the articles and I realized I agreed with all of them. Part of my appreciation was that Rakim had created exotext.com etc.

Just a cautionary tale to not pattern match prematurely. Premature optimization...

Though building in guardrails to prevent premature optimization is an important hack. E.g., faces really do matter in terms of slowing people down and taking them more seriously I think. And just building in anti-premature-optimization "tread" or friction for lack of a better word. E.g., avoiding click bait titles that people might pattern match on. It's not the author's fault but it might be more successful that way. Cause - really insightful blogposts. I feel like a fool for dismissing them at first. And yet I hope they get wider reach via perhaps subverting the ways we pattern match (not that I or other people should but I think based on other comments and how people pattern match on me - yet another tech bro, etc. - it exists...)

Author here. I appreciate your honesty; this is indeed a curious observation. I, too, have found myself patter-matching personalities by titles of their works, design styles of their blogs, etc. I sometimes would even feel some sort of resistance when I started to discover that my patter-matching was off the mark.

> Google’s actual UI & UX design is terrible

Absolutely. I have long mentioned that Google got lucky that the initial search was a textbox on a white screen and nothing else.

If they had tried to do a portal or something like Yahoo! they would have failed miserably.

Till today, I haven't seen a good design from Google for anything complicated. Just look at what a mess Gmail is for instance.

Great engineers, horrible product and design folks.

I don't even understand the logic.

All search engines look like Google search

All calendar apps look like Google calendar.

All maps app look like Google maps.

All email clients look like GMail

I'm not saying Google invented any or all of these but it sounds like you don't like it the colors or font but that's different from your larger point.

Show me an instance where Google's UI is radically different from industry norms and then you'll have a point.

Some of this shit is complex and complex things look complex.

Google search is literally the first search engine doing that.

Gmail is the first email client that arranges conversations like that

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