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Google Images Restored

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Re: Google Images Restored

#51

Post by neilpanchal »

gchokov wrote: post #5

Someone in Google’s UX and Design department, really needs go out and breathe some fresh air. Is it only me, who dislikes 95% of the design decision of Google products in the recent years?

There are so many things that bother me about contemporary UI in general, I ranted on here the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293

I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of predictability, etc. are all symptoms of this.

There are still some gems that I find here and there: https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/

Re: Google Images Restored

#52

Post by syndacks »

errantspark wrote: post #11

Fuck Getty Images. Fuck IP law. Fuck copyright. All that shit needs a massive refactor. I can't bear to think about how much harm has been done to software and human reality in general by lawyers and MBAs seeking to extract the maximum amount of value from things. I'm glad things like this exist, but so sad that they need to. EDIT: and as one commenter astutely pointed out, fuck Pintrest too, a perfect example of the…

We wouldn't have modern civilization without IP law. Curious how you make a living; if it's like anything like the vast majority of the people on this site, or society in general for that matter, it's rooted in laws protecting theft of intellectual property.

Re: Google Images Restored

#53

Post by derefr »

NoSorryCannot wrote: post #48
_underfl0w_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent poster but I see where they're coming from - form used to purely _follow_ function in computer UI/UX (as in most engineering fields) but now it's been delegated to "creatives" who, by virtue of their skill set, put form first. Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the…

I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional. A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other…

I think they’re talking about a certain kind of “brutalist UI” that used to exist because it was the only possible UI for very simple systems (e.g. switches to bang bytes into registers to bootstrap a machine; character-oriented VRAM you wrote to directly; two-character Unix commands to save line-printer ink; etc.) and then was carried forward as a sort of tradition by people used to that restrictive minimalism (e.g. modern uses of Forth; C for application programming; shell commands that are non-interactive even when run directly from a PTY; essential config files in arcane formats that aren’t easily machine-generated, under the expectation that people are doing system bring-up by hand, Linux-From-Scratch style; etc.)

Re: Google Images Restored

#54

Post by fuzzy2 »

101008 wrote: post #37
fuzzy2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re in good company though. UI/UX in general is going to hell. Not just in $big_corp, but nearly everywhere. I think that’s mainly because we have UI/UX as a dedicated function now. It’s a job that seems to attract people that don’t know how software _works_. This results in “uncanny” UX that looks similar enough but just doesn’t work the way it should. Maybe I’m just getting old though!

I am interested in your point of view. Care to expand?

It's really quite simple. I've been using PCs since Windows 3.1. With "good software", I intuitively know how to use it and how it will behave. Of course, new concepts arrive every now and then, like ribbons or the hamburger menu or whatever. However, what's behind them is in the end still the same.

When I am faced with the challenge of designing an interaction in software, I always try to make it fit established patterns.

Now I'm working with a UX expert. The interaction designs I receive are just not right. They are not intuitive. I am rather disappointed. My impression is that this expert is simply not an expert PC user. Of course, that's N=1 as far as my professional work is concerned.

Furthermore, in the last… 12-15 years, more and more software seems to change just for the sake of change. My personal opinion is that this is because of designers trying to justify their existence.

Re: Google Images Restored

#55

Post by yudlejoza »

ubercow13 wrote: post #14

But why that version? It wasn’t much different from the current version. I preferred the version before, when the page didn’t automatically expand and collapse and scroll around in a disorienting way.

Agree.

The new UI is actually slightly better with the image view on the side instead of taking up the center of the screen, since we have widescreens everywhere.

But both are worse than classic google images, which was from when? 2015? 2013?.

Re: Google Images Restored

#56

Post by alacombe »

syndacks wrote: post #52
errantspark wrote: post #11

Fuck Getty Images. Fuck IP law. Fuck copyright. All that shit needs a massive refactor. I can't bear to think about how much harm has been done to software and human reality in general by lawyers and MBAs seeking to extract the maximum amount of value from things. I'm glad things like this exist, but so sad that they need to. EDIT: and as one commenter astutely pointed out, fuck Pintrest too, a perfect example of the…

We wouldn't have modern civilization without IP law. Curious how you make a living; if it's like anything like the vast majority of the people on this site, or society in general for that matter, it's rooted in laws protecting theft of intellectual property.

> We wouldn't have modern civilization without IP law.

Disney focused copyright laws have nothing to do with the development of modern civilization. There is plenty of case where overly tight licensing has proven detrimental to a technology.

Re: Google Images Restored

#57

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

gchokov wrote: post #5

Someone in Google’s UX and Design department, really needs go out and breathe some fresh air. Is it only me, who dislikes 95% of the design decision of Google products in the recent years?

Definitely. They had their nice moments when they introduced the first version of material design, but it got rather ugly when they started putting outlined icons everywhere.

Re: Google Images Restored

#58

Post by atombender »

I started using Bing's image search when Google Images started going downhill. It's cleaner and more usable, with easier access to the original image.

But Bing has unfortunately been going downhill, too. It does some double redirect that breaks the back button, and it often appears to be stuck. And its ads are intrusive. But the worst thing is how they inserted this thing called "Shop for similar", which is a completely useless widget inserted above the "similar images" sidebar widget. It's weirdly dissonant when looking at, say, a photo of people in immigrant detention centers and being offered sweaters similar to those in the photo.

Re: Google Images Restored

#59

Post by londons_explore »

Lammy wrote: post #39
clintonc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main changes this extension addresses were made because of a settlement with Getty Images. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

The worst part of the settlement isn't even the UI changes but how the image search results now seem to favor showing Youtube video frames above showing regular images from non-Google websites. I guess they get to pass the buck to the video uploaders who have asserted (truthfully or not) that they have a right to upload whatever they're uploading and that they "grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-fre…

I guess one of the ranking signals is probably "amount of legal trouble this result will get us into".

Re: Google Images Restored

#60

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

neilpanchal wrote: post #51
gchokov wrote: post #5

Someone in Google’s UX and Design department, really needs go out and breathe some fresh air. Is it only me, who dislikes 95% of the design decision of Google products in the recent years?

There are so many things that bother me about contemporary UI in general, I ranted on here the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of pred…

I think the current trend away from good UI is itself a symptom of a larger trend in our industry: the trend away from respecting the user.

Users are not customers now, they are cattle. You farm their attention and don't care about enabling them.

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