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GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

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Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#141

Post by ashleyw »

jdietrich wrote: post #19

It'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…

You can go too far with A/B tests, and maybe the Google execs realised that. You just end up with a fragment of your user base who like everything and convert well, and likely a majority who don't (to varying degrees, of course.)

To make a 'good' product, you've got to make some tough design and feature choices on your users' behalf. Case in point: Microsoft vs. Apple. Microsoft are well known to test extensively with "real" users, and Apple, well…don't!

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#142

Post by alextp »

adrianhoward wrote: post #132
pcwalton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's actually a more subtle problem: if you test a radical redesign, there's a higher likelihood it will fail even if a subsequent series of small changes to it would have produced something better, just because the incumbent is so well optimized.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#143

Post by adrianhoward »

alextp wrote: post #142
adrianhoward wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's actually a more subtle problem: if you test a radical redesign, there's a higher likelihood it will fail even if a subsequent series of small changes to it would have produced something better, just because the incumbent is so well optimized.

So, so right.

What I was trying to say was that the problem isn't with A/B testing - it's with overly simplistic usage and interpretation of A/B testing.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#145

Post by taligent »

ekianjo wrote: post #109
commandar wrote: post #75

Earlier 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…

Why not ask Google:

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#146

Post by taligent »

thezilch wrote: post #121
DavidAbrams wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I move the cursor to an area in which there are no visible controls? Thanks for your response, but this is shitty UI. Is the user supposed to sweep the entire screen, pixel by pixel, looking for Easter eggs?

You've never hovered over the chat area? Nonetheless, the bar could could probably use a hint when also hovering the labels area. I'm still unsure how you have written off the designers as simply inept. I could take down any UI with such an attitude.

Excuse my language. But are you fucking kidding me ?

That is the worst UX I've seen in a long time. Since when is blank space considered a target area to hover your mouse over.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#147

Post by coob »

option_greek wrote: post #105
andrewfelix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These designers are doing whatever makes them look I doubt Google would let a group of self interested ego fueled creative's override rational principal and analysis. Especially considering this is a flagship Google product with 350M users. >On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. I'm a designer. I've never properly criti…

Haven't you faced any problem with the toolbar buttons ? they are all lumps of coal with minor variations!

Are you serious? I see 5 symbols up there. First is a box, for selecting mail. Next to it is an arrowed circle for refresh. No Problem yet. After that it's 'More', which is text. No problem telling the difference there. The others are eon the right hand side, clear chevrons next to numbers telling me where I am in the list. The last is a distinct settings cog.

Am I missing something?

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#148

Post by sdoering »

OpinKerfiBjarni wrote: post #139
seldo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

And even this seems to me to be not quite right. There was a talk, Marissa Meyer gave on Velocity '09:

http://blip.tv/oreilly-velocity-conference/velocity-09-maris...

Just watch from 1:00 to 2:00 -> One Minute will answer the question.

Here she tells the story, how the first Google Design came to live. It is quite interesting. It seems, that minimalism wasn't a rational choice and that it came to stay only, because the data proofed it to be the right lucky choice.

I can understand, that the minimalistic homepage was a point of pride. I would be proud, to minify the homepage of the company I work for.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#149

Post by e_proxus »

wavesplash wrote: post #24

I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes. In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme: http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic... Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing: http://jasoncrawford…

This user style puts the text back on the buttons: http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons...

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#150

Post by mattmanser »

ajross wrote: post #43
jdietrich wrote: post #19

It'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…

Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing (nor, frankly, an unjustified one). What surprises me is that we haven't figured this out yet and rehash the same flame war every time. The desktop environments show this best: c.f. Gnome 3. Also Gnome 2. And Gnome…

You're begging the question.

If we take what you say is true every redesign is good, which is patently false.

A perfect example is the Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster. Also putting Vista in your list there, mmmmmm. Wasn't exactly a great redesign was it.

The Google redesign is also pretty much a disaster.

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