Google’s look, evolved • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#291

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:22 PM UTC

meatysnapper wrote: post #286

nostrademons wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Design by AB testing, my favorite :( I worked at a major tech company where every decision needed to be justified by AB testing. Our design was a series of haphazard guesses made on data that depended on a very brittle data pipeline. Needless to say, nobody thought it was a very good product, but the incredible bureaucracy and people behind the approach made it hard to fight against.

[deleted]

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#292

Post by lackbeard » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

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…

I agree and I wish I had insight into what exactly is going on inside Google. A couple of hypotheses:

1. Someone (or a group of people) within mistakenly believes this design aesthetic[1] is good and have gained a lot of political power. I guess they like things that look pretty in screenshots instead of things that are actually useful or intuitive?

2. They're heavily optimizing for some metric (engagement, user growth, whatever) that is orthogonal to (or has a small component along) the usability vector.

[1] Simplistic defaults, not easily configurable, flat, tons of whitespace, etc...

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#293

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

The tilted 'e' immediately reminds me of Enron.

You know: "Even the 'E' was crooked."

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#294

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:30 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #127

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…

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…

I understand the urge to try to maximize on stuff like this, but in the end it loses sight of what's most important: the quality of the results. And sometimes I feel that a lot of valuable engineering time and effort is wasted on making things prettier and better monetizing in the short term when in the longer term the better search results are what would really move the needle.

And most A/B testing focuses on the very short time effects of the change (and change all by itself, even change for the worse can have a short term positive effect just because something is new). On another note: A/B testing has another limitation, which is that you're optimizing for the bulk, please one person more and you more or less automatically annoy another.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#295

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:30 PM UTC

Interesting to me is that in the video they use "you can Google it" and "let's Google it". In the past they - apparently - have made pains to avoid using Google as a verb as that's a type of genericisation of the trademark in to a term for internet searching in general.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#296

Post by ascorbic » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:34 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #295

Interesting to me is that in the video they use "you can Google it" and "let's Google it". In the past they - apparently - have made pains to avoid using Google as a verb as that's a type of genericisation of the trademark in to a term for internet searching in general.

They've always been fine with people using it as a verb, as long as it's only used to mean searching with Google, not searching in general. That's what would risk genericisation.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#297

Post by yakshemash » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #257

qq66 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

(The app, on iOS) I have no idea how to switch between satellite and map view. I have no idea where to look for that option - or if that option exists. There's a burger menu, so I tap that. There's a list of options. Satellite is in that list, and is highlighted. The option I want, and I don't know what it's called, doesn't appear to be in that list of menu items. I tap the map to collapse the burger menu. I hold the…

I know you're making a bigger point, but just in case you are still wondering: have you tried to touch the highlighted satellite option again to unhighlight it? Some of the items in that menu enable and disable layers. Satellite is one such layer. Keep in mind that some of the layers are mutually exclusive, so you can't have public transport layer and traffic layer, which probably makes sense as it avoids cluttering by layers which are rarely needed simultaneously. This was confusing to me until I got a hang of it. This has been the case on Android for a while, but I have never tried the iOS app, so its behavior may be different. Besides that, I get your pain about pins being dropped whenever the map is touched (or clicked on desktop) to get rid of drop-downs and menus.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#298

Post by raldi » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #249

raldi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The evolutionary, data-driven approach will never yield a Nest thermostat, iPhone, Helvetica, or flag of New Mexico ...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 measuri…

As I said, the problem is writing the tests and knowing what to measure. How do you discern between a bunch of tests and measurements that are poorly-designed, and a bunch that are well-designed? You gather a bunch of people with good taste, and trust their gut.

But at that point, why not just cut out the middleman, forget the tests, and let the artists be artists?

See also: Footnote 3 of http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html#f3n

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#299

Post by ljk » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

sirn wrote: post #169

Ciantic wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New favicon? https://www.google.com/favicon.ico - is still the old one.

The new one probably not populated to all their location yet, but adding a random query string does the trick. https://www.google.com/favicon.ico?newlogo (I'm seeing a four-colors capitalize G.)

why does adding "?" work at getting a different logo? not a web guy here

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#300

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Sep 01, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #294

nostrademons wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand the urge to try to maximize on stuff like this, but in the end it loses sight of what's most important: the quality of the results. And sometimes I feel that a lot of valuable engineering time and effort is wasted on making things prettier and better monetizing in the short term when in the longer term the better search results are what would really move the needle. And most A/B testing focuses on the ve…

There are plenty of talented people working on ranking and webspam too.

There's a limit to how parallelizable those problems are. At some point, more people working on an algorithm doesn't make it faster or better, it just makes it more confusing and worse. Mythical Man Month applies as much to Google as it did to IBM. And so you might as well put people onto optimizing the rest of the page as well, because they'll do more good there than having yet another cook in the ranking algorithm kitchen. (I'd argue that there are too many people working at Google in general...I left, so I'm no longer contributing to that problem. But then, there were probably too many people when I joined, so I contributed to it for 5 years.)