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

341–350 of 447 posts

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#341

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

> One of our biggest problems was that since we tried to change everything at once, the metrics went haywire

Isn't that the problem with empirical methods in general? They are great for measuring the effect of small simple things (like small changes to a web page), but are much less effective in measuring bigger things (like say, programming language A vs. programming language B).

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#342

Post by pconner »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #305
mentos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the attention they brought to the angle/attitude of the 'e'. Never appreciated before how it has a friendlier feel.

The 'e' thing was hamfisted and implies they're a "hey fellow kids" company.

The e has been slanted since the 1999 logo

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#343

Post by nostrademons »

msellout wrote: post #335
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'm surprised no one on the team was familiar with multivariate analysis. That's the wrong way to say it. Let me rephrase more carefully... I'm surprised no one used more sophisticated analysis techniques to allow an experiment that changes many explanatory factors simultaneously and estimates the effects of not only each factor independently but also their interactions. It's relatively straightforward statistics and…

There were stats Ph.Ds on the team that were certainly familiar with it, and I knew at least one former Amazonian manager that held that we were too afraid of having multiple experiments running at once and too afraid of confounding factors. (Amazon's A/B testing is much more traditional split-testing, where they show one variant to half the population and one to another half and then pick the best one.)

The biggest problem is that many of the folks involved had encountered very surprising and counter-intuitive interactions between features, and because of that, they didn't trust the textbook models. For example, at one point we had a very convenient embedded-Python experimentation framework that let us rapidly try things out. Our main data-scientist on the project decreed that we were not to use it, because a number of the externalities that framework introduced - higher latency, and potential error conditions - could confound the metrics in ways that were not well-understood at the time. Data is useless unless you can trust that it actually represents reality.

Stats textbooks all make certain assumptions about reality when they present the models, and if reality doesn't conform to the assumptions, the models won't conform to reality. Certain factors were well-studied enough that we could build useful models from them - that was the point of all the experimentation around color, after all. (I wonder if those conclusions still hold, anyway: data has an expiration date, and I recall personally running an experiment that directly contradicted an experiment Marissa Mayer had run 6-8 years previously.) But that requires a lot of hypothesis testing and verification: it's never a matter of "well, the model says so, therefore it must be", but rather "well, the model says so, let's run an experiment to see if the model's predictions line up with reality, and if they do, we have a pretty strong - but not ironclad - indication that we can use it for future calculations."

tl;dr: Largest and best-funded social science program I've ever seen.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#344

Post by nostrademons »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #341
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…

> One of our biggest problems was that since we tried to change everything at once, the metrics went haywire Isn't that the problem with empirical methods in general? They are great for measuring the effect of small simple things (like small changes to a web page), but are much less effective in measuring bigger things (like say, programming language A vs. programming language B).

Absolutely. Business is an interesting field because you derive a fairly large advantage from being correct about reality, but that advantage counts for nothing if you're so slow that somebody else changes the reality while you're figuring it out.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#345

Post by meerita »

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.

It shouldn't be a problem. In science, everything must be tested and proved if you want to know the truth or the effectiveness of an theory. Design is a science, so it can be measured and developed by tests of all kinds, even emotionals.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#346

Post by raldi »

hanspeter wrote: post #329
raldi wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But all three logos were designed and introduced at the same time as their corresponding favicon. Your claim was that the favicon was just a copy of an existing part of the logo.

Your claim was that a favicon could be a different font than in the logo. But these examples are all a part of the logos. Google would have needed to rebrand their logo to do the same.

The claim was, "Using a different font [on your favicon than the one you use in your wordmark] would make absolutely no sense."

I believe I have successfully refuted that claim.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#347

Post by chipsy »

hodwik wrote: post #71
roymurdock wrote: post #10

Just when I thought we might be starting to pivot away from flat design - does anyone know of a different design paradigm that is being used by smaller/fringe designers who are tired of flat/minimal UX/UI?

Flat design is easy to accomplish for designers who never learned how to draw, or do computer modeling. Unfortunately, most design programs don't actually teach these foundational skills. That means there are a lot of designers out there who are forced to work in an oversimplified print-design style to hide their incompetence. As someone who hires for this stuff, finding skilled designers is unimaginably hard. I hear…

The level and breadth of skill you're describing sounds more in tune with someone who isn't calling themselves "just a designer". They'd have a broader digital arts background and advertise themselves as illustrators too.

Maybe change the job title and see what happens?

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#348

Post by lighthawk »

qq66 wrote: post #206
DanBC wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Suggested changes:

1. Ensure you can enter two addresses into the search delimited by " to " and it be able to correctly split into directions, as you would expect. I tend to expect this to work and it took maps messing this up several times on different occasions to burn it into my head to put the destination address in the search, then click on directions, then enter my starting address.

2. If I type in "from (address)" and search it should show my address in the top of the directions from/to and focus on the "to" field. This is really broken currently, because it always seems to think I want directions to somewhere instead of from. Similarly, if I type in "to (address)" it should open directions and place the address in the correct field.

3. Sometimes the "near me" feature doesn't work. Try it with all sorts of things like "bathroom near me" and see how well it works.

Speaking of mass transportation, it'd be great if Alphabet could spend some money and effort on that. It makes much more sense from a business point-of-view than Google cars do- how much more R&D money is going to be sunk on that before all is said and done? Will it be worth it? Electric cars have to get their energy from somewhere, and everyone having their own car takes a toll on the environment. I understand it's a big place, but if you have the money to roll out fiber and wifi everywhere, you can buy buses, which are much cheaper.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#349

Post by jszymborski »

Buge wrote: post #301
akvlad wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nope, just cached https://www.google.com/favicon.ico?cache

It must be cached somewhere within Google, since shift refresh doesn't update the old url and it's https.

favicons cache differently. You either need to enter a different favicon address (favicon.ico?v=2) or reload and restart the browser.

I know it's weird, but favicons are weird.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#350

Post by scintill76 »

arikrak wrote: post #239
DanBC wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In their bid to keep things clean and automatic, they really made everything more confusing. I know people who have gotten lost because they didn't realize Google maps was hiding directions. They always try to do things instantly instead of letting the user press enter. (This is especially annoying on Google Express.) There's something to be said for the old web when you clicked and then got results...

I hate that feeling of having to type as fast as possible, so the instant fetching won't waste bandwidth or distract me before I've finished giving it all the information it will need. Multi-step processes like getting directions can be annoying this way, as it reloads every time you change a parameter (like entering an address, swapping source and dest. addresses, or changing transportation mode), so if you have to do all three to get what you actually want you're really going to be waiting. Am I just a weird user? I mean, I know my frustration isn't very rational, but is user frustration ever rational? It hurts the product either way.

Sometimes I just do a general Google search (from Chrome's omnibar with Instant searching disabled) for the directions I need. It usually auto-detects it's a maps query and has a card ready to go with options. Then I don't have to wait for suggestions to load or for the map to pan around.

Post reply on HN