In the end, apps should be more familiar, and easier to use.
The change itself is always frustrating, people who are used to an uix (by learning it), hate change, even if the new uix is simpler.
It will be like everywhere else. Someone wanted to change stuff to make their mark and found a way to get survey results that confirmed their decision.
That's all well and good, but they seem to do this every two years or so.
I think the guy has valid points, and your post is just an appeal to authority.
Sadly it's not only google, it's also Microsoft (Windows 8), Gnome (3), Ubuntu (Unity), etc. This UI minimalism consisting in removing features with no good reason is killing me.
Also, not that it matters, but the old app is 2 MB and works flawlessly, the new one is more than 20 and chugs a bit when scrolling on a quad core processor.
This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.
I do not think that necessarily follows. Even if you are not the customer, they likely (think they) are designing it for you. Because they need you to keep giving them your data, they need you to find the UI easy to use and easy to hand over data.
The new Google Maps UI is fucking custom tailored to showing you advertisements. It's much less useful now for things like driving directions or finding businesses that don't pay for sponsorship (i.e. if I search for "Rite Aid" from my house, it shows me a Rite Aid 3 miles away instead of the one literally 50 feet from my front door.)
Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising.
If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away.
I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.
Whatever OS you pick, there are elements that are simply wrong.
I have a particular loathing of iTunes for its many persistent idiocies, but I could just as easily pick examples from Windows or Linux world.
Designing eye-candy is much easier than designing good application work-flow - and it's the latter that defines the UX.
It's baffling that this is either not understood or ignored by so many product managers.
Or maybe not - if you research app design books you'll find a huge amount written about coding conventions and ideas like MVC, and quite a lot about HI standards and graphic design, but (relatively) almost nothing about workflow design.
That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that.
Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products.
Err, no. How does the left version cram more advertising in than the right version here?
http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/An...
> That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that.
That sounds like Unix to me. Seems to work just fine …