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Care to precise when was that?
I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s. Despite looking janky, functionality was actually easily accessible.
Nowadays things may look sleek, but this comes at the price of functionality being hidden in arcane settings submenus, hamburger icons that expand, etc and so forth.
I may have misinterpreted what you meant by the "welcome injection of professionals", I just hope those professionals are not the ones to have defined the tenets of how things are designed nowdays.
Whether you intended or not, unfortunately this shows your bias, privilege and lack of perspective
Tech has become incredibly accessible, inclusive and mainstream because of the research and hard work of UI/UX disciplines.
The very site you're using is a benefactor of that.
I encourage you to talk to your users (if you are in a position) or folks who are less fortunate than yourself and see how this "bad design" is changing their lives.
You see, as a developer I use things such as laptops, IDEs, spreadsheets and so on. They are all meaningfully worse nowadays because of something I consider a cardinal sin of design - "style over substance". In order to make things look pretty and sleek, functionality and usability is sacrificed.
Like it or not, you are the one speaking from a position of privilege, defending the indefensible by issuing non-statements, and disregarding valid points brought fourth by users.
And this extends far beyond developers. Talk to actual users, ask them what they actually think about modern UI.
And then don't dismiss it as "learning effect" or "change aversion" or "requires habituation", but actually listen. Moderny mystery meat UIs are not as much of a success as thought leaders proclaim.
There are no other sites I find as frustrating to navigate, except perhaps zooms website/user admin console.
There's a reason why a cockpit of Airbus 380 looks intimidating. Some of the complex stuff looks complex.
Google products don't intimidate me with a large number of features, rather they annoy me by hiding the features I use all the time while shoving things in my face I could care less about, expecting me to do things in the opposite order of how I expect to use them, etc. Search for "Google transit" and you don't find an entrance to Google maps optimized for transit users, instead you find a landing page that is probably of interest to 1% of the people who are searching for that
https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/
I wanna say that it is "enterprisey" in that it is certainly oriented to about 50,000 enterprises worldwide but it's got the same visual veneer of simplicity that Google likes which doesn't come across as "enterprisey"
Perhaps to a novice. But for experienced folks it is pretty ok.
What gets me are applications for "creative" people. I was in this hackathon [1]
https://prod.cis.cornell.edu/dgas-first-game-jam-gives-game-...
where I used Unity for the first time and thought it was nuts, the same way I'd think Photoshop was nuts if I wasn't used to it.
[1] we won! had a guy who was good at making platformers in Unity and a gal who was a good artist. I was just the startup veteran who knows the meaning of "minimum" and "viable" and how to find the intersection
Figuring out how to extract the GPS coordinates for a location (without having to deconstruct the URL or delve into devtools) after the latest UI rearrangement in gmaps has been turning into a regular a scavenger hunt...
This isn't complex stuff. With some regressions it's hard to tell what's negligence and what's actively user-hostile. My Occam's Razor is growing duller by the quarter.
Firstly, if their site is broken on mobile they’ve fixed it because it works fine for me.
Secondly, they aren’t trying to claim that Google is terrible just that everything doesn’t have to look identical.
Even if Google is “better” it’s cliche at this point. Why are you so angry at somebody suggesting that some sites should not look like Google?
On the other hand, the Material Design icons are supposed to be used in mass market products that people can use right away and I can say they still look the same to me despite looking at Android on and off for more than a decade. (Chinese kids learn thousands of characters in 10 years of school!)
I agree with the author that the interface for Google Drive, Google Docs and other facets of their monolith (they're really the same system and shouldn't be presenting under different names at all) is atrocious. Google knows that I am logged in when I visit the "Google Drive" page and presumably knows everything about me [2], such as the fact that I frickin' use it for work and have no reason to ever click on "Try Google Drive For Work" -- ever!
Then there are all the twisty little things to click on the left hand side that all look the same like "shared folders", "shared with you", ... The one thing that's constant is it is always hard to find what I'm looking for whatever I am looking for whenever I am looking for it.
I've been laughing at the fanboys (or shills?) who want to get their bathroom done in Material Design or want to get a Material Design tatoo or have an Itasha [1] in Material Design. Gets me voted down a lot but go ahead, I've got the karma to lose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itasha
[2] like that time I clicked on a YouTube short where a Chinese girl transforms into a fox on American TV and now it wants to show me hundreds of AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into everything
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110417985807049704
Notably the Google app icons commit the same sin that many multi-colored designs make in that they don't prefer any part of the color wheel over other parts in a particular symbol which makes all the symbols look effectively grey. I think of Scott McCloud's critique of the use of color in Stan Lee-era Marvel Comics and how actually the mid-2000s black and white reprints of those comics were great and affordable and showed that the color didn't contribute much.
In the case of the Google icons though they look terrible in monochrome too because the use of color might fool you into thinking there is contrast between visual elements in the icons except... look at it in monochrome and you see there isn't much.
While studying Japanese, I had to learn Kanji, so I know a little about Chinese characters. I was fascinated to learn how they work, pretty amazed at how an intricate writing system was designed by combining a limited set of strokes and radicals.
My recollection is a little different. When the "professionals" showed up, that was right around the time when things started to suck. I'm sure it was only a coincidence, though.
There's another term for this - gatekeeping.
There is irony there that does not sleep.