Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

jonoscript.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 234 posts

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#71

Post by njharman »

Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste.

To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#72

Post by njharman »

Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste.

To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#73

Post by thezilch »

DavidAbrams wrote: post #50
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…

OK. I'll call them inept and pan their design based on months of USE. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one example needed to prove the failure of this new design: http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...

Click the square/arrow to the right of any label, there are a plethora of options, including when and why a label should be shown at all costs. Frankly, the label functionality that exists now, in the redesign, is amazing.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#74

Post by muyuu »

ilamont wrote: post #18

Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz"). (I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)

Has effing tabs so you can have a "compose" tab open and reach your email for info to copy-paste in your message.

Something as basic as this is missing in gmail's default interface. Having to save and go back to drafts is cumbersome, as are other work-arounds.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#75

Post by commandar »

ekianjo wrote: post #29
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…

I have heard the same thing about Google before, but obviously there seems to be a change. The old Google would not "push" a new interface when there is so much resistance to the new design. I may be suffering from a sample bias, but no Gmail user around me likes the new design. If they did test this stuff, maybe they cherry-picked their target population to get the results they wanted to please the designers. Who kn…

Sample size of one, but I love the new Gmail UI, personally.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#76

Post by theoj »

zmmmmm wrote: post #33

When 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…

>> 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.

Interesting observation... this is something I struggled with as well coming from a coding background and trying to do design -- at the individual element level the colors seemed great, but pulling back to the larger picture everything looked washed out. Did you ever come up with a solution for this?

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#77

Post by andymangold »

Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who don't understand design abusing style and visual trends.

The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#78

Post by thezilch »

mthreat wrote: post #68
anthonyb wrote: post #51

All of the things that he's complaining about are changeable in settings. And not even buried three levels deep -- they're right on the first settings page! 1. Pick a different theme. I have one with a blue background, not the default light/white one. 2. Go into the general settings, and change your star to a different colour, ie. enable the red, or blue one, or the green checkbox. Now they stand out. 3. Go into the…

Thanks, changing the labels to text is a big help. I didn't even notice it there in General settings. It still doesn't change the tiny "..." link to a text label (the thing you click on in a message to show previous messages in the conversation). See my other comment here about Fitts' Law.

While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#79

Post by twelvechairs »

One of the main problems why the 'clean design' has not actually benefitted users is because of gmails feature creep. Where once I could just write and recieve mail, now, by default, I have 'stars', 'circles', 'importance markers', '+ share', 'notifications', 'gadgets'... etc. all confusing my view of my mail. Most users don't want any of these things, and they certainly don't want to have to spend mental energy realising they dont want them, then hunting around in settings menus to see if you can actually turn them off...

There are some good design additions in the revised gmail too, but IMHO the above is really what makes gmail feel much more cluttered and cumbersome than it was before....

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#80

Post by thezilch »

muyuu wrote: post #74
ilamont wrote: post #18

Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz"). (I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)

Has effing tabs so you can have a "compose" tab open and reach your email for info to copy-paste in your message. Something as basic as this is missing in gmail's default interface. Having to save and go back to drafts is cumbersome, as are other work-arounds.

Pop the compose into a new window and/or tab? The assumption is probably that tabs and windows are built into your browser, why build another layer of tabs?
Post reply on HN