241–250 of 447 posts
I love it. Quite often logo redesign processes gets completely out of hand, but this was a significant improvement over the older version: Cleaner, more modern and beautiful in all its simplicity. Bravo!
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Google maps is incredibly frustrating to use. I can't understand what user testing they do.
What changes would you make to Google Maps, with a basic set of assumptions? (let's say, you can't dramatically increase the cost, you can't hurt Google revenue sources, and you have a team of ~20 engineers to work on the changes).
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…
So, just to give a counter point.
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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.
> A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota. Ah, but it will. When you're a company like Google, with hundreds of millions of users a day, it's only a matter of time that something like an outdated logo will start to lose you customers. People make sub-conscious inferences about your product based on appearance. If you start looking like that thing everyone used to use, they'll start looking for alternati…
My personal process for using Google (not saying everyone is the same, but...) goes something like this:
1. Type "g" into the address bar
2. Press enter, because www.google.com auto-populates at that point
3. Start typing my query while the animation of the day is loading
4. Press enter
5. Review the results
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> 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 logo…
This is a false comparison. Logos for clothes sit on the clothes which are themselves judged entirely on their appearance. Google's search engine has a separate function that stands on it's own two feet irrespective of a change to an 'e'. > If you don't have a good logo you don't have a good business Come on my good man, get a grip!
Some do. The vast majority of designer clothes don't.
People buy the brand, not the product.
> Google's search engine has a separate function that stands on it's own two feet irrespective of a change to an 'e'.
People bought into the Google brand identity. They were the first to eliminate all the crap around their web search engine, so it would just be a single text box. This made sure people know what Google was - the simple search interface. All of this is part of the brand's visual identity.
Do you think they do an empirical study on this when they first made it?
It is your brand that sells your product.
The shape of the letter 'e' is part of that marketing that sells your product.
In fact, EVERYTHING you do is fundamentally related to sales. You are always closing.
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Google maps is incredibly frustrating to use. I can't understand what user testing they do.
What changes would you make to Google Maps, with a basic set of assumptions? (let's say, you can't dramatically increase the cost, you can't hurt Google revenue sources, and you have a team of ~20 engineers to work on the changes).
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> A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota. Ah, but it will. When you're a company like Google, with hundreds of millions of users a day, it's only a matter of time that something like an outdated logo will start to lose you customers. People make sub-conscious inferences about your product based on appearance. If you start looking like that thing everyone used to use, they'll start looking for alternati…
Google's logo is so important to keeping users around that they frequently replace it with a silly animation about a current event. This redesign was for Google executives, not Google users.
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…
The reason they did that was so that they could build up data on the effect of each factor independently. That way, when the bigwigs get into a meeting and discuss alternative designs, they can predict "Ok, this will have $X effect on revenue but will decrease search latency by Y ms, which itself will have +$X effect on revenue." I was the first engineer on the first visual redesign that tried to change everything ab…
Further, more and more of this seems to have been "backported" into traditional desktop presentation design.
While I will experiment around until I more or less "get it" (although I may miss finding some useful features for months), it particularly frustrates people like my parents. Mom is somewhat spatially challenged (although plenty bright in other ways), and I've had numerous calls with her where the controls for what she wants to accomplish have changed and simply bewilder her. AND, given her spatial orientation problems, sometimes we will have to have the same conversation several times -- because the rather arbitrary-appearing icons and patterns don't immediately "sink in".
P.S. I mean this as a legitimate question, if it fits the parent's -- or others' -- field of experience. It seems that a lot of this design is expected to simply permeate and be picked up by osmosis. Is that really the case?
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I've never understood that criticism. Business decisions should be data driven. You test new signup flows to see which one onboards users better. You test advertising changes to see which one converts better. Why should a logo design or a title bar color be any different? Without testing each iteration, how do you know which one has the best effect on whatever success metrics you're using? I can understand if you're…
> Business decisions should be data driven. The evolutionary, data-driven approach will never yield a Nest thermostat, iPhone, Helvetica, or flag of New Mexico. We have no idea how to even begin to write a fitness function for good design.
...for now, given today's technology, but I wouldn't bet on it long term. History is full of examples of things we once thought only humans could do.
But once many candidate designs are available to choose from, what better a way is there to unambiguously decide on the best besides testing and measuring?
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Actually Helvetica is an evolution of the 1896 typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akzidenz-Grotesk
But it wasn't designed by an evolutionary algorithm; it was designed by a genius typographer who trusted his own sense of taste.