Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google’s look, evolved

googleblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 447 posts

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#221

Post by 7952 »

DanBC wrote: post #198
hellbanner wrote: post #197

Google's userinterface, in gmail.com, at least, has gotten progressively worse, and worse, and worse, and worse since its inception in my experience and everyone I've asked about this. ... don't know what else to say. I question if their designers use their own products. Latest bugs worth mentioning: Chrome still has an issue that can cause microphone to not work in Hangouts. Gmail.com has added a "Your plug-in googl…

Google maps is incredibly frustrating to use. I can't understand what user testing they do.

It always feels like they concentrate on the mobile navigation product and ignore the desktop which has a much wider range of uses.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#222

Post by kllrnohj »

robryk wrote: post #148
abalos wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes. That's huge for low-bandwidth users.

Why? This is one of the most cacheable resources. Also, it's displayed reasonably often, so I'd expect it to be rarely evicted from the device-local cache.

First impressions matter, and caches do not help with that in the slightest.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#223

Post by TylerE »

brainburn wrote: post #208
DanBC wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google maps is incredibly frustrating to use. I can't understand what user testing they do.

I think above all they test on fast internet connections.

Honestly, I have an ~110Mb cable connection (From a fast CDN I can acheive downloads in excess of 13MB/sec) and new Google Maps is still a dumpster fire that is inferior to old Google Maps in every way I can imagine.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#224

Post by [deleted] »

DanBC wrote: post #198
hellbanner wrote: post #197

Google's userinterface, in gmail.com, at least, has gotten progressively worse, and worse, and worse, and worse since its inception in my experience and everyone I've asked about this. ... don't know what else to say. I question if their designers use their own products. Latest bugs worth mentioning: Chrome still has an issue that can cause microphone to not work in Hangouts. Gmail.com has added a "Your plug-in googl…

Google maps is incredibly frustrating to use. I can't understand what user testing they do.

[deleted]

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#225

Post by mozumder »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #207
krapp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logo design and typography are intended to affect you subconsciously, not consciously. That tilted 'e' is meant to advertise the brand in the middle of dozens of other logos in the store, and draw consumers in from that myriad of choices based on psychological cues and associations they may not even be aware of. The effect is important in aggregate - some large number of potential customers conditioned over a lifetim…

That's what designers tell you anyway. Objective support for this hypothesis is thin on the ground. In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision. Whatever bounce effect businesses get from a new logo can usually be explained just as much by novelty as by implied psychological voodoo. Generally, I'm suspicious of management-by-logo. When I see logos being updated at vas…

> That's what designers tell you anyway.

And everybody else in the world.

> In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision.

Great. Then replace the Chanel or Louis Vuitton logos with a bright primary colored Google logo, and see what their purse sales are like a year from now. I'm sure millionaire socialite women would love to have their bright red-blue-green-yellow logos on their Saint Laurent jacket (although it would be perfect for Moschino...)

Sorry dude, but you're over thinking this. Logos are part and parcel to brand identity, and everything about branding determines sales.

If you don't have a good logo, you don't have a good business.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#226

Post by raldi »

ricardobeat wrote: post #189
raldi wrote: post #9

2008 HN discussion from when the outgoing "little blue g" favicon was introduced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211518 In it, Dustin Curtis criticizes Google (rather rightly, in my hindsight-enhanced opinion) for a Marissa-Mayeresque design process of "Make 300 logo variants with pseudorandom permutations, and then pick your favorite." Looking at those permutations now ( http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/S…

> Apparently nobody even considered trying a different font. That's because they were designing a favicon, not doing a rebrand. Using a different font than your logo would make absolutely no sense.

Plenty of sites use a different typeface in their favicon than the one they use in their logotype, e.g., Blogger, McDonald's, Nasdaq, and Bing.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#227

Post by alooPotato »

bradleyjg wrote: post #218
alooPotato wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, do you have any specifical examples of things that got worse? I.e. density, new compose moles? Why are they worse for you specifically.

The nine dot menu instead of a small header row was a terrible change. First because it is an extra click every time for a commonly used task and second because no one had any clue what the hell nine dots were supposed to mean. A friend of mine that worked at google told me the official name is "app drawer". I have no idea how that's supposed to look like a drawer. More generally the entire move from words to pictogr…

Really? That seems smart to me. How often do you use the links in that drawer? Seems better to remove all that text up top and replace with a small icon for something that is rarely used.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#229

Post by jonknee »

forgetsusername wrote: post #120
jonknee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark and got a chance to do it. A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota. And it will be slightly changed in another couple of years by some new VP who wants to shake things up and get that next promotion.

> "It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark " Anything them there MBA-types do is bullshit, am I right? In fact, I have no idea why Google doesn't run from the command line only! I'm sure glad to have HN around to tell me how most of the machinations of a large global corporation are pointless. By the way, do you have one shred of evidence that this was a VP looking to…

No, MBAs do a lot of important things and I have no idea if anyone involved in the post has an MBA. The language used in this post uses a lot of words to explain nothing. It's basic corporate bullshit. MBAs are good at it, but by no means are they the only shovelers.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#230

Post by branchless »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #207
krapp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logo design and typography are intended to affect you subconsciously, not consciously. That tilted 'e' is meant to advertise the brand in the middle of dozens of other logos in the store, and draw consumers in from that myriad of choices based on psychological cues and associations they may not even be aware of. The effect is important in aggregate - some large number of potential customers conditioned over a lifetim…

That's what designers tell you anyway. Objective support for this hypothesis is thin on the ground. In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision. Whatever bounce effect businesses get from a new logo can usually be explained just as much by novelty as by implied psychological voodoo. Generally, I'm suspicious of management-by-logo. When I see logos being updated at vas…

I agree with you. I don't care what google's logo is. AskJeeves had a good logo but their search engine was hopeless.
Post reply on HN