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GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
131–140 of 234 posts
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#132It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width. Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster. U…
I'm not sure that the fact that something has been thoroughly A/B tested makes it indefensible. It is possible that overuse of A/B testing results in a local maximum, with sweeping changes needed to reach the global maximum.
It is possible that overuse of A/B testing results in a local maximum, with sweeping changes needed to reach the global maximum.
That's not overuse - that's just bad use :-) There is nothing to stop people split testing radical redesigns.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Took me literally a few minutes to adjust. Like a lot of UI elements the association of function is formed over time. Everything I do in Gmail is second nature to me now and the UI doesn't impede much if anything. I do wish email attachments would appear on the right of the email thread.
Yup plus you don't need the precursor of knowing the English language.
That's a poor excuse, Google knows how to do internationalization.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#134It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width. Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster. U…
There is absolutely no way they tested their design on anything smaller than a 15" laptop. I don't need to see their test data to figure that out; loading Reader or Gmail on my 10" netbook is good enough.
Agreed, the content pane gets reduced immensely on my 12" screen. Thank FSM for Stylish and Google Reader Absolutely Compact ;)
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sample size of one, but I love the new Gmail UI, personally.
Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers, if possible with a large enough user base to avoid the sample-size bias ? I'd be interested to know if there were. That way, we could really compare if most people have a problem or not with the Gmail UI. At least, we can see there was a significant increase of "Gma…
Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers
The problem is that the numbers don't matter in isolation. It's wrapped in two assumptions:
* That it's possible to make something that the vast majority of the population likes. Especially for something as complex and context dependent as email. No matter what Google does some section of the population won't like it.
* That it matters to Google (or any other company) that N% hate a product. I don't care if 75% of the world hates my product if the remaining 25% love it - and shovel money in my direction because of it.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#136There's something deeper going on here: The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements…
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Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#137What I hate most is that when typing an email it is contained in a fixed size box. I can't fill my screen with my email, I have to scroll inside the box to move up and down.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to spe…
The solution is to learn color and how it works. Start with something like color theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory
Kuler is a great tool for this sort of thing.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you think the possibilities are that either google ignored the data or the data is wrong with no affordance to the possibility that you are wrong?
When something is as viscerally, obviously bad to me as the new GMail UI, I go with my gut. Google has no track record of great UI that would make me question that feeling. They built the world's simplest home page not because of some profound respect for minimalism; they just didn't have anything else to put on it.
This is wrong. The minimalism of the front page was, in the early days, a point of pride and something that engineers fought for (note: I worked for Google for 3 years on a team with a fair number of old-timers).
I'm failing to come up with a link at the moment, but I remember a widely circulated bit of folklore about how an unnamed engineer within Google set up a cronjob that anonymously e-mailed the entire team a single number every day. After a while people figured out that the number was the byte count of the front page, the implication was that it was a metric that needed to be watched carefully.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#140There's something deeper going on here: The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements…
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I don't think hiding the labels on the buttons and making them stand out less helps casual users at all.