51–60 of 107 posts
The thick white outlines do a good job of ensuring that the letterforms aren't impeded by other design elements.
The cleared-away areas around cities are a good use of "white space" to increase the hierarchical dominance of major metropolitan areas.
There are some nice detailed observations here. Bookmarked.
It's really interesting that Google seems to be at times able to pull off wonderful UI design bordering on genius (Chrome, Google Maps) and at other times just barely able to be at par (most of Android with select exceptions). I guess this just reflects different teams within Google, but it's a shame they can't apply their best UI talent across all their products (and particularly, the products that most need it, lik…
Related: They're trying (sort of): http://code.google.com/closure/library/ Here's a talk once about their process: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=697KX4Ciiws#t=02m40s and a blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-goo... P.S. Anyone know an easy Maps API trick for setting zoom level to display each of the U.S. states (which vary dramatically in size)?
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&... (from searching Texas)
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You're assuming they didn't arrive at these settings for borders, weight, classes of label via A/B testing of various alternatives. Google has enough resources available that for something like this it could easily substitute brute-force testing for "best-practice" design (and there's a number of arguments why that might be the better choice, including the fact that design practice seems to evolve over time.)
They would still have to think of these ideas in order to test them. Talking about 'brute-force design' implies that there is no thought involved.
Text has background, envelope, whitespace (leading, kerning, etc.), font, outline, fill (and probably other general properties too). It's not A/B testing but I could see engineers iterating over variations - should the envelope follow the curves of the text or be a box or blob, etc.. All spacing, be it kerning or border-width can be iterated over, colours too - indeed thinking of this makes me want to write an Inkscape plugin to help in font choice.
You can level your objection again but I don't think one would call thinking what shape an outline could be "design" per se. Indeed if you're just presenting alternatives to a user and looking for the one with the best feedback I think you arguably have done away with a design stage.
Very good article, and the visual aides helped a lot.
Better to explain with a picture: http://imgur.com/sy06x
Notice how the google's 'i' is perfect. No grey hinting.
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like Android Huh? Works for me. Consistent? Perhaps not. Bad design? Hardly, and it's getting better with each release.
I find Android a lot easier to use than iOS. What I've noticed when using an iOS device is that I often can't figure out how to do something. Then I research it and discover that it simply can't be done. Easy to learn, but unusable. Android, on the other hand, trades discoverability for usability. I have heard that some Android users don't even know that they can pull down the notification bar. But once you learn to…
It gets tiring to click the same message-contact shortcut and sometimes to be taken to the right place and sometimes to the list of users, or trying to attach an image and not be sure if the gallery application will crash or not (and having to manually close it), or after N text messages sent and getting a lovely "Message could not be sent" error not knowing if it's the messaging app misbehaving or my carrier (almost always a force close of the messaging application fixes the issue), or the scrolling in the browser acting up while locking and unlocking the screen miraculously fixes it... There's also the focus on fancy features like navigation while neglecting the basics like the phone part. I had more control / features on the phone side with my ancient Sony Ericsson dumb phone than on my "superphone"
The potential is there though...
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Google does an above average, and often good job, at actual usability challenges. But they are pretty universally bad at making things that people would consider beautiful. Chrome gets usability issues right. Things like their tab closing behavior, the almost total lack of dialogues, one click bookmarking, etc. are all really great. But Chrome is not a beautiful app. Its toolbar icons are fairly childish, its tabs ju…
> But Chrome is not a beautiful app I guess it's totally subjective and therefore fairly meaningless, but I think Chrome is the most visually appealing of any browser right now. This is partly, I guess, because its primary virtue is minimalism, but the parts that are there are beautiful, I think.
Am I the only one who thought the Bing maps were more "readable" than the Google maps? I do agree that the Yahoo maps were by far the worst, but to me the Bing maps were better designed (other than the color scheme) than the Google maps. Maybe it's just me?