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?
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.
Those two tend to be related. It really angers me every time I see a huge amount of whitespace for no good reason, but then most of the functionality is hidden behind a dropdown menu whose equally stupid '...' indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF.
Back when UIs were still good, things would usually be hidden only if there wasn't enough space. You could see almost everything you needed at a glance. The "designers" dismiss that as "messy" and "clutter", which is frankly absurd --- something functional is not going to look "clean", much like a machine shop that's in active use: Tools and parts are laid out everywhere, because the user needs access to them.
That diskprices.com site is great. Craigslist is another one that comes to mind. The only thing it's missing is a "submit" button for those who have JS disabled... otherwise it's a perfect example of extremely functional design that wasn't ruined by "UI/UX designers".
"indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF."
My wife and I had this conversation the other day. There are things in iOS you only get or see if you long press. How the hell are you to discover these things?
It's a subtle psychological manipulation of the mind of the users of computers - stick to the simple use case, and don't do complicated things, don't try to be an advanced user, don't think for yourself and just consume what we tell you to.
There's nothing you can do. Computing stopped being about expert users the minute the rest of the world got online. Now the giants control all the devices, platforms, and mindshare. They will never cater to you. Informed users aren't the ones clicking the ads or buying the things as intended.
We've crossed into the gravity well of user hostility, and there's no longer any escape.
The annoying part is that they still need help with a lot of stuff but now all I can say is "no, I just don't know." I used to be able to figure out just about anything they wanted help with, be it how to program the video or set up windows just the way they wanted or in worst case write a program that solved whatever for them. Now I just feel stupid. What happened?
Some times not even long pressing is enough. Try to find the timestamps of your texts in Messages on iOS.
I spent several minutes bashing around, double tapping, longpress, force press, went into settings to look for toggles. Had to google it eventually. Turns out you do this by swiping left. And i had actually tried to swipe sideways before, but only right.
Once you know it it's actually very convenient, but discovering it is near impossible.
But "modern" software is perfectly usable without documentation! /s
I miss the days when software actually came with very detailed documentation for the user. They had their hidden features too, but at least there was documentation for them.
Long pressing is the equivalent of a right-click or shift-click, it's a well-established pattern. MacOS tried to avoid right-clicks for the longest time, but often there's just not enough space to have every feature discoverable by visuals alone.
Of course, hiding everything behind that is not good, but when I look at apps like FairMail that try to show you what you can do directly, it just gets very confusing and the space left for the actual content becomes miniscule.
This is all personal preference, but personally I strongly disagree with you. I find that diskprices site to be poorly organized, difficult to use, and the majority of the site is the full (non-normalized) text descriptions of the individual items, which is not only a giant mess of text, but also unnecessarily replicates data. The data columns are misaligned, too much repetition of certain words that could be abbreviated ("External/ Internal"), etc.
I think it's good design to hide certain functions behind "..." - For example, I can't tell you the number of times I've accidentally flagged a post on HN just because my finger accidentally touched my phone or because I was trying to click the comments link a few pixels away (which is the feature that people want to access on 95% of clicks that occur in that region). If I had to hit "..." first, it would never happen because I would have just accidentally opened a menu. (And if you flag something, you may never be able to unflag it because it loses ranking and appears at another position somewhere on the site or disappears entirely).
It's a "flat design" vector art style inspired by the work of the Memphis Group that's called "Corporate Memphis" primarily by critics. While Hacker News is apparently too sophisticated to be condescended to with simplistic animations that look good at very different resolutions, I think a lot of people like it.
If everyone hated this and considered it "corporate," it wouldn't be the one used by some of the animation studios that create the most popular content (e.g. Kurzgesagt).
I'm pretty ignorant of design styles, but what always bothered me about "Corporate Memphis", and styles like it, was the very weirdly caricatured humans depicted within it. The people usually look incredibly weird, and while it's not quite "uncanny valley" or whatever, it feels like a very cheap and ineffective attempt at implying diversity. Maybe this isn't the intent at all, but it's most noticeable when there are differently deformed people in the art. People in real life come in all shapes and sizes, but not in the same way, with very bright colors and comically different proportions. As a non graphic designer, I appreciate that such a flat, 2D style may require some unrealistic designs, but as a human, I'm pretty sensitive to depictions of especially unrealistic human imposters. I adore Kutzgesagt, and I think that may be due in part to their predominant use of birds and other animals as agents, rather than strangely proportioned people.
They represent an urbanite 20-something's version of diversity. I appreciate the effort, but I noticed that it rarely represents characters of different ages or styles.
This is very low on my list of grievances though. I like those vector characters quite a bit more than the stock photos they replace.
I wouldn't be surprised if the simplicity of the style made it interesting for constrained budgets and time tables.
Kurzgesagt mentions on its patreon that they used to spend on average 150 hours on each episode and are now at up to 500. While the style stayed mostly the same I think there is now also a lot more going on visually than in the early videos.
I don't think it has anything todo with vectors. Sure general vector art tends to be simpler. What I see is mostly people complaining about empty space, that can be used, and have to access common actions through a menu, also a lot of times no way to add common action like customizable readily available menu ect...
While the uncluttered design for something someone only uses a couple times might be fine to avoid overwhelming someone. If you use it daily and even multiple times a day that can make it harder to use.
It also remind me something i read about a ticket kiosk for some transit system. They updated the kiosk with simpler interface to select various things. While effective for infrequent riders, people who would purchase tickets daily found it much slower because the old kiosk allowed them to type in codes they memorized.
I'd say it started with the mobile web. Lots of space and simplistic interfaces make a lot of sense when you have a small screen and fat fingers. It is terrible on a desktop but since people want a unified experience, to keep things familiar to the user and to simplify development, you get the least common denominatior.
I'd say that the "flat" trend was started by Microsoft with Windows Mobile and Windows 8. Apple and Google followed (for once Apple didn't start the trend). I liked it at the time, maybe for the novelty, but it quickly faded. Still I understand why people may like it.
Why would I want a unified experience between desktop and mobile, when input methods are completely different? It's kinda like using a bicycle handlebar to steer a car.
See whilst diskprices is very functional, it is aesthetically poor.
Good design has both functionality and form.
Design is not only about being as useful as possible, but also to present something that is beautiful - it is easier to build a relationship with a user when they are compelled to enjoy a product more due to its visual appeal.
I think a lot of developers seem oblivious to the power of aesthetics because they are so ardently in the functionality camp. The density of information on DiskPrices, whist great for a power user, would probably be daunting and overloading for the average user and whilst it has a retro vibe, is catering to a niche - people technical enough to be looking at disk prices.
100% agree. When I look at the Windows 10 UI, like for example the settings app, everything is flat, square, 2 tone and all the whitespace makes it look disorganized. It looks downright depressing.
My biggest gripe - since I can’t add to your excellent critique of today’s design problems - is when someone comes up with yet another css framework or the like which removes ALL affordances, hides critical functions under mysterious icons, removes ALL colour and personality... then calls it “beautiful”.
I don't agree with you 100% here, I believe some small tweaks could make diskprices.com more accessible. But your own main website is so damn good: https://neil.computer/
Functional, high visibility, accessibility, discoverability. There's no bullshit, no hidden anything, it's true minimalism and 100% honest. This is what actual good design looks like.
A dark mode would be nice, though.
I agree with you overall, but diskprices is far from perfect UI. The layout of the information and how it is accessed is useful. But other design elements, such as color, would make it better.
One of the best designed products I've ever used is the TiVo DVR. We first got one in 1999, the year it came out. I loved it, but realized how well it was designed when I started using other DVRs in the mid 2000s. As a prime example, to delete an episode on a TiVo required pressing one button. On another DVR I had it was six button presses! It was like this for countless things. It was obvious the folks at TiVo had thought long and hard about usability and design and other manufacturers couldn't care less.
Now imagine if TiVo made their remote a rectangular cuboid with hard edges, and all the buttons were hard plastic squares that were all the same color. It would still be much easier for me to delete an episode on the TiVo than on other DVRs, but holding and using the remote would not be a positive experience. Putting some work into the remote so it fits in your hands, the buttons are nice to press, and color and shape of buttons helps you find the button you want would make it so much better (thankfully they did).
Diskprices is similar to the hypothetical TiVo with a crappy remote. Someone worked hard on some aspects of design and usability, but out of either ignorance or arrogance ignored the rest of the aspects.
Agreed. Finding the right balance between beauty and functionality is definitely a something that seems to be in decline. I've used applications that present too much data and others that hide it all away, both equally frustrating.
I appreciate the structure of that diskprices website, a big list and a filter bar is one of those classic designs that has disappeared in the modern web. Nowadays it'd be an AI-sorted list that attempts to filter with a search bar, the list would fit four items per page because it insists on showing you pictures of hard drives, and it'd be paginated at some absurdly small number of results per page (or infinite scroll).
That said, I disagree with its FAQ claiming whitespace and color wouldn't help. It'd be a lot easier to actually read the data with a light alternating row color, slightly more vertical spacing, and not styling the links as a wall of underlined blue text.
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-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business"
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.
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 prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.
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 business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well.
And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.
I think the shift in recent years has been from "UI designers" to "graphic designers". There is a massive difference between the two, but also a lot of conflation. Computer programmers may not be the best UI designers, but graphic designers are even less so, and the "but my art!" graphic designers are the absolute worst.
a main tenet of graphic design is sacrificing your art for functionality. i'm not sure what designers you've been speaking to, but i doubt they're professionals.
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.)
Given two functionally equivalent pieces of software, customers will choose the prettier of the two. That's all I want to contribute to the conversation.
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.
It comes down to a simple, enduring principle: people who don't use something shouldn't have sole authority over its design.
So many of the complaints about the dominance of seemingly-incompetent UX professionals really boil down to failure to consume one's own dog food. The UX pros are not incompetent at UX design, but they are unfamiliar with the tasks that the program will ultimately be used for, and that's even worse.
This phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize, even here. If you buy a new Porsche 911 today, you'll find that the garage-door opener button has been moved to a touchscreen menu. People who take a bus to work are now designing Porsches, in other words. It's only going to get worse from here.
Corollary is that many engineers are unfamiliar with the tasks that end users are actually going to use the software for. This phenomenon is definitely more widespread that people in this thread seem to realise, afaics because many are power users used to power interfaces. Power interfaces are generally not enormously useful for the majority of users (preemptive /s: yes, please tell me anecdotes about how pet power interface is superior).
Yes, there is flawed design: that covers most design, in the same way there is flawed programming, which covers most programming, and flawed approaches to business which covers most business, and so on.
[edit] the feeling I get from the threads here is that many commenters don't get that most design involves huge tradeoffs, same as programming. Design training is not "make a pretty thing" (which is what many commenters seem to be dismissively suggesting, which is actively offensive), Dribbble is really not reflective of actual design, and much of what you see is surface driven by designers having to find tradeoffs to deal with management edicts/commercial goals/technical limitations that may conflict with otherwise good design
The programs used to ask for a file name before saving it somewhere. Programs with modern UI/UX just save the file to a random place and then you have to search it.
The browser saves it to Downloads, or to the Desktop, or perhaps to the home folder.
The GNOME screenshot tool saves it to the home folder
The GNOME audiorecorder saves it to somewhere else
iOS homescreen management is one example. Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable.
The the control center... changing audio source - fine motor skills required if you ever find how. Long pressing things means its faster to do things from settigns.
My pet peeve is macos Photos. Forget ever watching your videos for which storage you pay. It just won’t play until you click edit which is gonna just crash app about 10% of time. If it doesn’t it takes 5 minutes to download at like 10mbps.
> Three confirmations to delete app. Can’t delete app from search. Editing stacks is miserable.
I would even consider it by design - management doesn't want apps to be deleted so easily. It's a subtle nudge for a user to accumulate apps, which slowly increase and eat up disk space.
The justification is that if no one deletes apps often, the button to do so should be hidden away, so users don't "accidentally" delete an app. And the designers are just a cog in the wheel - they listen to the objective given to them by management and do exactly that.
This is why you see great designs from apps that are written/made by a single person, or from a small team that cares. One such example is IDEs like Intellij - the UI/UX design is very much geared towards developers (by developers).
This is it. I'm shocked by the amount of blame designers are getting here while they have a job that gets the most unskilled criticism and feedback (as displayed in many comments here).
Everyone has an opinion on design, including stakeholders and management who their jobs depend on. I think all the engineers here don't realise the privilege of having their own impenetrable domain.
Add or Remove Programs on Windows often requires more than 3 clicks to uninstall an application as well, so I'd argue that specific complaint isn't new.
On macOS you can usually just drag the .app file to the Trash.
I disagree. UI/UX designers often make utopic designs that would work great for the user, the engineers don't have the resources (time) or the will to execute it well and halfway through execution of the already dressed down version management pivots the team to their latest whim or fucks it up by adding a bunch of badly designed requirements meant to hack metrics.
We live in a world of Frankenstein UIs and it's not the designer's fault what ends up on your screen.
If you want to make a historical comparison, I'd argue that it's more likely to be in the way of working of today vs back then when UI design would get locked in much more _or_ get truly designed along the way with the product needs.
But software rarely exists in a (design) vacuum. It runs on Windows, it runs in a browser, on an iPhone… or maybe the software already exists and it's just a new feature.
That's why "we live in a world of Frankenstein UIs". We don't need "utopic designs" but rather consistency. Both in visual language and interaction design.
There are a few notable exceptions like HMIs on industrial machines or a car's entertainment system.
Of course, incorrectly implemented design exists, too. No doubt about that.
I disabled YouTube on my Android phone, and use it in the browser instead. It is heavily overloaded with functionality, that any accidental touch results in an unwanted action.
Google Search on mobile browsers is horrible too. When having a typo in the search terms and trying to fix it, the search field moves to the top of the screen and it constantly happens that I click on the second or third entry in the list of suggested searches.
I also have issues with GBoard, which cause tons of typing errors. My last iPhone was an iPhone 3G and I recall it having a much better keyboard many years ago than Google currently has.
It's almost as it was deliberate to artificially increase certain click KPI's or force users to use the phone's search bar or autocorrect function.
I believe, decision makers at Google are too far away from the products, and while managers might have developed good soft skills they massively lack practical knowledge. Google would do good hiring more engineers and less academics and managers.
I cannot recommend the combination of NewPipe and VLC enough. Have to get NewPipe on your own, because it disables youtube ads as well so it's not on the Play Store.
It's been the only offline youtube solution I've found.
Paying Google is another offline youtube solution.
It's odd, though, I watch much more youtube than Netflix at the moment, but since all the stuff on youtube is available anyway, the monthly subscription still feels too expensive, despite being cheaper than Netflix. I wish they would unbundle their music offering, which I have no interest in, but presumably that's precisely why they won't unbundle.
Speaking of Youtube "mods", has anyone created any tools that provide a unique related videos algorithm or the like?
I find that the rabbit holes I went on years ago were much more interesting than the content I see on youtube now, and I don't think it's that the content is getting worse.
I am a designer and my opinion is that they’re micro optimizing with A/B testing to such a degree that they miss other significantly different paths that would be better overall.
It really does seem a local/global maxima problem with the way they're trying to improve. I think they've been locking themselves into the local maxima, and at their scale it's probably really hard to expand the search beyond what's 'safe and known.'
Google is data driven and AB tests the hell out of their features, so I would assume these changes make them money somehow. Your personal preferences or anyone else's is merely a very small data point in their design process.
Doctors used to believe that basic hygiene was unnecessary despite having enough information in theory to figure out this wasn't so.
The presumption that someone in theory has access to lots of information and therefore is making the best or even good decisions on some dimensions by virtue of the their access to data is poorly considered. It is entirely possible to be smart and possessed of good data and still use it poorly. People are flawed so companies made of of people are also flawed.
Google image search is a poor product not worth using compared to bing.
It's kind of contrary for you to prove that google's design is optimal according to the scientific method with the bald assertion that it is scientific with zero evidence by virtue of it being proprietary.
My feeling about its utility isn't a scientific statement its purely anecdotal but at least it represents a singular actual and honest viewpoint.
You are free if you liked to express the alternative perspective that the changes are for the better for users or for google and this would be an equally honest anecdote even if we disagree.
The only intellectually dishonest viewpoint is to assert without detail or analysis that its good along some dimension because it is AB tested.
Google image search is mediocre for the following reasons
- They removed the button to actually go TO the image in response to a lawsuit with Getty on the theory that somehow making people go through an extra step would stop people from using their built in browser tools to download images.
- When you go to the page where the image is supposed to be you may actually find yourself on a page only vaguely related to the exact image. Maybe it WAS found on the front page of some infinite scroll through crap but the desired image is nowhere to be found when you click through and get whatever new crap replaced it on the front page.
- Alternatively you get served a smaller sized version of the image.
- Not only are the filters not shown by default in google image search vs bing in mobile firefox google opted to disable that functionality meaning you had to load the slower desktop version of google for the tools to filter by date or other details to show up. This wasn't a bug it was a deliberate design decision to attack a competitor that they ultimately reversed later.
- Google image search seems to deliver subjectively worse image search results. I realize this is hard to quantify.
- On the broader google search issues you actually need an extension to be able to right click on a link and copy the url to share it because otherwise you get something like this
It's pretty amazing to break sharing a damn link. The addon to fix this requires worrisome permissions to the data for google.com
Also the search "this is a test" without adblock doesn't show any of the textual results on the entire screen on a 24" 1080p monitor. Screen 1 and 2 are a video, exhortations to buy the song, people also search for videos and finally some actual results on screen 3.
Google is basically 90s Lycos with lots of extra money and reach. Everything google does other than ads and chrome ranges from acceptable to just canceled. They do lots of things OK but nothing excellent.
> Not only are the filters not shown by default in google image search vs bing in mobile firefox google opted to disable that functionality meaning you had to load the slower desktop version of google for the tools to filter by date or other details to show up. This wasn't a bug it was a deliberate design decision to attack a competitor that they ultimately reversed later.
And reverse image search still doesn't work unless you spoof your user agent as mobile Chrome.
I wish it was money they optimized for. It's probably engagement or some other obscure marketing metric.
The problem with that is if they introduce a bug that requires you to refresh the page more often. All they'd see is an up-tick in "engagement" and keep the change with the bug. I think it happened to me with Facebook page notifications and not being able to clear them properly, at least on Firefox...
Yes, companies are profit-driven always. Not customer-satisfaction driven, unless that's what will bring them the most profit (especially true for newer, smaller companies).
This makes me wonder if there is some structure similar to a corporation which would maximise something besides profit, without either being out-competed by a corporation or turning into one.
Competition ("out-compete") implies competition on some metric such as profitability. So, if that's the metric, then they'll be profit-driven. Of course, profitability can be optimized for over different time horizons--even if speculatively. For public companies, time horizons tend to be relatively short, or at least quarter-to-quarter profitability is important.
A private company, however structured, can define out-competing however its owners want to so long as it can pay its bills and employees.
Public companies are driven by what their executives want, insofar as their owners aren't paying attention. If they were pure paperclip maximizers they would switch businesses more often, but you don't see coal plants selling fentanyl out the back.
I'm pretty sure that the big corps are changing the design based on some toxic metrics where they don't really care if we, a small demographic of power users, get annoyed all the time
And I am very, very pissed off at the neglect of Google Classroom's UI. I wish they had (and would still) stay out of education, it's so irresponsible to half-ass it like they have.
Google Classroom's UI problems have got to be negatively impacting kids' schooling. It's unethical.
From what I remember reading some comments from ex googlers some years ago is that if you can't quantity something nobody will be listening too serious. So designer have difficult times there:)
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.
The only thing that I like about gmail.com is the search feature and the fact that most of my accounts are tied to it. But I use Thunderbird for getting my emails...
