Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?
GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
31–40 of 234 posts
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#32Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.
Don't shoot the messenger - Who cares if his site is not easy to read? It's all about the message. He does not pretend to be a UI designer or something.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#33When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) 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 speak anything to the user. This is one way I know that I'm a mediocre designer. Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well.
I feel like Google has suffered from a similar problem - the solution to every UI problem these days is minimalism. Remove borders, accents, highlights, colors. On the surface it looks clean and simple but scratch beneath that and it seems to have no soul and no reason to exist.
I think the same issue goes directly to functional aspects as well - the functions and features on the page should feel alive as if they are speaking to me. I should be attracted to them, immersed in them, like they've been incorporated as parts of myself - but I'm not - I can barely differentiate them from the inactive, static parts of the page. Most of Google these days feels like I am filling out an IRS tax form. At best it is boring, at worst it is aggravating.
I'm looking forward to when we get through this new style of design from Google.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#34Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#35There'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…
>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 critically analysed the new Gmail design. But I haven't felt the need to. For me it just functions really well.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#36many of these issues can changed to be more old-gmail-like http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-... 1) remove important markers 2) add labels to actions/buttons
http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail-interface.htm...
Even closer revert-to-old via the Stylish plugin and CSS hacks.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#37I feel completely opposite, if anything I think gmail should go back to being simpler and more minimalist instead of more complicated.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#38On an unrelated note: I noticed people always complained about GMail having bad service (like me, when I couldn't open particular pieces of mail for a few days at a time). How do these problems change when we become paying customers of Google? When I get a Google drive, do I get help in fixing problems? Or is that a lie I want to believe in?
You get proper email support if you are paying for gapps for domains. I don't know if that's what you mean by paying for gmail.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#39I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#40It'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.