How Google Got Design
fastcodesign.com
fastcodesign.com
So here I am, with my beefy SSD machine, a 50 Mbit/s connection, a JS engine that is orders of magnitude faster than anything we had a few years ago, HTML5 offline storage, HTTP/2, still waiting >5sec for several Google properties to load, waiting >15sec for CEF-based Spotify to load, knowing that with today's tech, these things could fire up within <100ms.
It's no disaster if I have to wait for a few seconds, but especially for secondary tasks (like looking up an address on Maps or playing a song) which I do en passant while focusing on something else, I find that waiting for only a few seconds can already steal my focus. When I fire up a music app (be it non-Google Spotify, Google Play Music or whatever), it would be great if at least the search form was available immediately. Knowing that it won't, that instead my expensive PC will go sluggish for a few moments, I find myself just avoiding these things increasingly often.
And it's sad to know that Google once was pretty obsessed about reducing these little latencies wherever possible. Today, they develop SPDY and QUIC to save a few ms, then throw web frameworks at me that take whole seconds to load.
It's not that I didn't appreciate beautiful interface design. It's nice to have a mobile OS that arguably looks better than iOS. But it also was pretty awesome to have an almost latency-free experience (and good information design, making efficient use of my screen), even with an old netbook and shaky GPRS internet on the train.
It's funny. I think most people would agree that the experience you described isn't diametrically opposed to 'good design,' and in fact have the same goals.
But, it seems like the modern conception of 'good design' has effectively been reduced to pretty things and interface design. Even if designers wouldn't say that if you asked.
Yup. The more obsessed we get about "pixel-perfect" interactions, the more insufficient native browser behavior becomes, to the point where e.g. Flipboard just throws it all away and creates a new UI layer using <canvas>. But that's probably not what either of us would call "good design."
Web is good, cross-platform is good, open is good but I don't think the price we pay for this is shameful overbloat.
I will agree that their stuff is certainly prettier now, but I've found the usability has tanked across the board. I'd rather have something I can use than something that just looks nice.
In the same way that engineers over-engineer, designers over-design. The difference is when you over-design a user interface the end-user actually notices.
In the same way that developers jump on the next new language and framework, the designer jumps on the next trend. But when you change the interaction pattern the end-user has to re-learn.
Those clever lines of code you love so much in your last project? That's the 50ms animation that really ties together the page - but creates that noticeable (and endlessly anoying) lag where after you click you have to wait to start entering data but you always start to soon and it misses the first letter or the keystroke does something else because the page focus is wrong.
Sometimes design isn't about pretty, it's about not annoying the office worker who uses your product several hours per day.
This. Could someone at Google (and every other hip software company) please print this 2000x with a wide-format printer and plaster the walls of the designers' offices with it? Thanks.
Every millisecond counts.
Nothing is more valuable than people's time. Google pages load quickly, thanks to slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions are eliminated. Google products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Tasks are streamlined.
Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn't sacrifice without good reason.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080719213524/http://www.google....
Design should include usability. The eye-candy part is just a wrapper.
By that definition, Google certainly doesn't get design.
I don't think anyone would disagree with that? But hiding useful tools isn't necessarily bad design either - there's usually a tradeoff to be made to help the majority of users perform a common interaction easier vs. surfacing a more infrequently used tool more prominently.
The problem with maps is that they appear to be making it up as they go along. There are years of user interface research but because we're moving to touch interfaces it feels like designers are throwing all that research away.
Maps now is a confusing hard to use program. Functionality is not hidden in one set of menus. To do something you hae to search through a few different places, and the only way to learn is to just do it, but there are few affordances so you don't even know if a thing on the screen is clickable (or whether you need to tap; hold; pinch; drag; or stretch it).
Even after using it, I still have to re-learn it every time i use it. There's no intuitivity (totally a word) at all.
I've seen a number of philosophy of design videos about material, is there such a thing explaining the design choices of maps? Some icons have background, some don't. Different options available depending on the mode. Novel, but frustrating for me, shadow menu under the search box. Is there some vision that I'm just not getting or I would understand better if I just looked at it right? I remember being really frustrated with unix command line interface until I understood the philosophy and then I loved it, would be great to have the same moment of clarity for maps.
I agree. That said, I think they're very early in infusing design with their culture. I would even argue pre-'design' @ Google, they were still very user centered, but in different ways.
Google is/was quite successful before they got design (let's say success in this context means something like: a large audience).
And even when they decided to get design: it took them a relatively short amount of time to get things "right".
I agree Material Design looks very nice. But I think functional value (just picking a term here) is so much more important, by an order of magnitude.
Speed, functional value (as you said), simplicity, and such really ought to be considered part of design just as much as a visually appealing set of colors on an interface is.
With the new support lib (22.2), Google has released a design lib which implements some material elements. With this common base, I hope to see the design of the different first party apps harmonize a little bit more in the coming months.
Also, while I absolutely hate even firing up Maps (but I need to), I find that people, whose first experience with them is the new interface, like it very much.
Google did well before they got design, but they have probably widened their audience and increased conversion by getting design so increasing their profitability.
Aesthetically pleasing design is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a successful, but it definitely helps.
When design is about cramming some animation in just about everything you can show on the screen, and about how fancy your colors are going to be – yes, I agree, it's relatively unimportant.
But real design is not about that at all. In fact, functionality has been part of the core debate in design, for at least a century now. Ask any designer – not only the ones dealing with UI, and they'll tell you.
Another issue is Material's animations. I literally cringe every time I have to use Google Translate on my phone. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to have full OS on your phone done with Material. Those whole element animations are so distracting and they actually make the app feel slower. I know iOS has also a lot of animation but the difference is where it is being applied. Material design applies it to interactions with elements while iOS applies it to transitions. If I have to wait and see how the element I just interacted with animates, it seems unimportant but if animation is used to mask loading time like for example when transferring between app and homescreen on iOS, then it feels natural. If you want to animate interaction elements, it needs to be really, really fast animation just to let you know that yes, I got your tap/click.
But also keep in mind that designing a framework that works for small screens and big screens is truly a hard task. Microsoft tried and failed with "Metro" and now Google is trying to pull it off. In my opinion Apple has been a bit smarter about this and kept iOS and OSX mainly separate while integrating some elements here and there.
I would like to have an even broader meta framework than Material Design that makes it possible to use different colors and fonts and maybe even different features to distinguish hierarchy. That way you could implement your own version of Material Design, that does not look googly.
Finally a junior developer said, what was wrong with a simple table?
I might be alone on this but there's something on material design that irks me. I find it objectively pretty: colors, typography, everything with a defining image, related or just a fancy cartoon. That being said, every time I am faced with this kind of UI, my brain disconnects, I feel bored and unproductive, play a bit with the buttons never to touch it again. I do not need smiley faces and happy tones to keep me hooked to something. I just want a productive interface that gets my job done.
It is quite similar to these old children books we used to have with levers and unfolding parts inside the pages to discover more (let's say, the human body and the internal organs, or a lever that makes a bird wiggle). These were fun, sure, but a raw book with no illustrations at all ends up being the most efficient method to transfer information.
One day Google will have to figure out that their userbase are no longer kids amused by a square, a circle and a triangle.
I recall Gmail being something so immediately appealing and better than the status quo that people ditched their existing email services and applications overnight to start using it.
1 - You respect designers
2 - You let them do their thing
3 - You guide them and is welcoming of (backend) changes that are pro-usability
4 - You avoid "thinking like an engineer" or "users are stupid" mentality
5 - You don't alienate them by A/B testing between 50 shades of blue
Whilst still common those ideas are known anti-patterns. Let us hope UX and solid design is absorbed into the mainstream in time.
Not only are Google interfaces ugly - I agree this is personal - but they remain unusable.
Indeed, they picked up good ideas from others (mobile interfaces from iOS, flat-ish design from Microsoft), but everything is cheap, in a lesser good quality, and particularly not user-friendly.
I'm thinking of:
- the new google maps - the new google drive - the new inbox - their google contact app - google play music - android interfaces as a whole
Please google, keep on being a data-gatherer, data-distributor instead of an app creator, and outsource this to other people who tackle this issue decently.
Material Design is getting a lot of developer traction even outside Android, surely that is a sign of some success?
I find the design language great on mobile but a bit hard to get used to on desktop (still prefer Gmail to Inbox on desktop for instance)
Making it look pretty while keeping it simple is challenging. I expect it will take them a long time, and we'll have to grumble through it.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.ie/2011/10/how-steve-jobs-influ...
http://www.androidauthority.com/larry-page-and-steve-jobs-ad...