
Google Design’s Best of 2019 - petewailes
https://design.google/library/google-design-2019/
======
madrox
I was the engineering leader for a grounds-up rebuild of a user dashboard this
year. For the people who use it, it's part of how they make their living.

The process of working with design was the most user-hostile experience I've
ever seen. There was quite a bit of "users don't know what they want" thrown
around when people saw the beta and complained. It was used quite selectively,
geared towards things the designer disagreed with. When the dashboard left
beta, it was universally panned. All our KPIs tanked. What's more, it was
considered a success because "redesigns are always poorly received." At all
the jobs I've worked at, I've yet to discern any true rules that designers
follow that aren't rationalizations.

I bring this up because nothing about this site...from its design to its
content...resonates with me. If this is truly the best of 2019 then designers
REALLY need to take a long, hard look at their culture.

~~~
Stratoscope
For another recent example, check the complaints about the latest redesign of
the once-great Weather Underground app on Android:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wundergrou...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wunderground.android.weather)

If memory serves, this app used to have a 4.5+ rating, now it's down to 3.2.

I did find the old 5.10.1 version of the app with a search for "download
wunderground android", so I installed that and have a usable app again. Until
they make some server change that breaks it.

~~~
Sebguer
Pocketcasts' redesign is another good example. It's at 3.3 and used to be
almost unanimously positive.

------
LeoPanthera
From the very first line of the article:

"The mantra “focus on the user and all else will follow,” is always top of
mind here at Google"

Please excuse me if I find that _shockingly_ difficult to believe. Google is
one of the most user-hostile of all the large tech companies. I'm genuinely
surprised they even had the audacity to write that.

~~~
rstuart4133
I can only assume you are talking about interacting with Google, the company.
I've never succeeded in getting any humans attention in Google, and I suspect
that very few people who don't considerable sums with them have managed it. It
is indeed like dealing with a gigantic, uninterested, stonewalling, machine.

However, the article wasn't about that. It was about their UI design
techniques. When I remember the clusterfuck that was the early versions of
Android, I'm truly amazed by how far they have come. Comparing Android Auto to
what the car manufacturers provide is literally night and day. The car's
native interface is cluttered with distracting detail and a profusion of
buttons and controls, whereas the navigation in Android Auto seems stripped
down to the bare necessities - just what you need to know. Yet they both have
the same feature set, so Google has managed to squeeze the functionality into
a UI so simple a single glance at the screen while tells you what you need to
know - and not much more.

Google Sheets on Android is to my mind a simply stunning achievement - the
pinnacle in UI design. I only discovered it when a desperate situation forced
me to use sheets in desperation on the phone. Anyone whose used a speadsheet
on a PC knows they support a large variety of ways of interacting with them by
dragging, right clicking, highlighting and so on, and despite all that need a
large menu at the top for the things not covered. How on earth could you
translate that to a tiny screen that can't distinguish between scrolling and
dragging? It seemed so hopeless I didn't bother to look for years. Yet when I
did look not only did they managed to include almost all of the functionality
of the desktop version in a tiny fraction of the space - they made it all
discoverable as well.

There is no way this is just luck, or the inspired work of a single man. They
had to have employed the engineering techniques like he those described and
probably many more besides - rapid iteration, testing many ideas with feed
back from multiple groups of users.

Now back to dealing with Google the company. Despite all this good work,
Google Sheets (both desktop and Android versions) has a flaw - in some
circumstances it can't add up. 1+1=3 is a pretty bad flaw in a spreadsheet.
(It's not as simple as that obviously, but it comes up with the wrong result
and yet if you export it to say Excel or Libre Office, they get a different,
and correct result.) But I don't pay for it, so do you think there is some
place I can report this? Absolutely not. They are frustratingly hopeless in
some ways.

~~~
rotterdamdev
Google calendar is bad, thought, especially since they removed the ability to
hide early morning hours. Nothing in my life happens between 00-08. Why can I
not hide it? Because some designer said so.

Now I just use thunderbird. Much better than Gmail/gcal.

------
malvosenior
I wonder what the thought process behind putting character design like that in
this post was. I find them utterly repugnant.

Combined with the color scheme (and as others have noted, page performance),
I'd vote this for _worst_ design of 2019.

------
ebg13
The page looks like
[https://i.imgur.com/RqWJb7Q.png](https://i.imgur.com/RqWJb7Q.png) for more
than 20 seconds until it finishes loading and then just keeps on downloading
more and more and more data (400MB and counting). Pardon me if I ignore their
ideas about design.

~~~
ggggtez
I only count 67 MB, with cache disabled an no add-ons.

~~~
ebg13
Same for me if I don't do anything on the page. But then if I actually scroll
the page it gets exuberant. I think it's loading the same assets many times in
parallel and possibly repeatedly. Also, "only", lol.

Look at this hilarious bucket of shit:
[https://i.imgur.com/36CBn5y.png](https://i.imgur.com/36CBn5y.png) And that's
in Chrome!

Firefox actually handles this page's bullshit gracefully, by saying "NO! FUCK
OFF, WEBPAGE!" ("Will-change memory consumption is too high. Budget limit is
the document surface area multiplied by 3 (730032 px). Occurrences of will-
change over the budget will be ignored.")

~~~
Stratoscope
In all fairness, you probably have the "disable cache" box checked in your
developer tools. If you turn that off, the multiple duplicate requests in the
network tab go away. Presumably the duplicates get served from cache.

Of course it would be better if they didn't make duplicate requests in the
first place!

~~~
nimos
Yeah it works out OK with caching. Very easy to track down with the new
initiator tab on the in Chrome Dev Tools. They have _initLightBoxItems which
removes all the images/gifs from the dom and then readds them which is bound
to the scroll event (with a 50ms throttle).

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
The whole gestures thing, besides a few handy ones, requires such a specific
set of circumstances (flip the phone over, turn it the right way, make the
gesture) to make them workable they are mostly forgotten about.

In general, it's just simpler to press the button.

~~~
jkoudys
This is a constant struggle in design, even (especially) when targeting highly
technical audiences. We frequently conflate the familiar with the simple or
user-friendly. People will shout "how intuitive!" when a designer repeats an
interface that's currently familiar in a context that forgets why the original
interface was helpful.

So we get a few nice touch gestures: scroll, zoom, etc. We then expand adding
more until learning all your gestures (on that particular os for that
particular hardware) is more complex than ASL.

------
mind-blight
This seems a lot more like an ad for their products or ideas than a breakdown
of great examples of practical designs. I was hoping for examples I could
learn from.

------
redorb
I don't know what the graphic style is called but I despise it. How is that
type of drawing not something anyone can do? Honestly. Unless these drawings
are done by children they are horrible, if they are I apologize and feel bad.
I think Box.com or Dropbox used similar graphics early on.. apple had some
going with apple.com/today but they have moved along.

~~~
mjrbrennan
I totally agree I find this drawing style of goofy-looking characters with
weird proportions that is going through so many tech companies right now so
confusing. I hate it.

~~~
userbinator
The "big bodies, tiny heads" style seems exactly the opposite notion of what
you'd want to convey with a tech company too[1]. It's like the exact opposite
of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi_(slang)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibi_\(slang\))

[1] Unless it's some sly reference to "smart technology, dumb people"?

~~~
mjrbrennan
I honestly think it's done to look more "whimsical" and "accessible" and to
dodge any sort of accusation of discrimination or exclusion. Which isn't a bad
thing at all. Just the art style is so weird and blobby.

------
trhway
>“A Space for Being” explored neuroaesthetics, the field exploring how design
impacts our biology and emotions

no arguing about impact, i feel it just by looking at the picture. Being GenX,
I'm probably older than the target demography (and the ones who designed it),
and that is probably why the impact on me has different sign - it looks to me
in a disturbingly unnerving way like a hybrid of prison cell and operating
room from dystopias where mind control/altering procedures are performed.

------
joegahona
Gotta love that Page Speed Insights score of 57/100 on mobile.

Maybe some of the HN Google employees can explain why AMP wasn’t used for this
slow page?

------
lostgame
So, wait, this enormous page doesn’t even load on mobile and exists to self
promote its own designs?

------
GenerocUsername
Thanks. I hate it.

------
decebalus1
For me, everything coming out of Google seems to be like a robot trying to be
friendly. Cold, insipid and uncanny.

------
gcatalfamo
The page doesn’t finish loading on mobile

------
mscasts
A page that talks design in one of the worlds biggest companies - has drawings
that looks like they're made from children.

Great, but the reason is obvious. It's to not offend anyone. That is the key
of making modern art 2019, design and art that makes even the most grumpy SJWs
happy.

~~~
userbinator
The modern euphemism for that is "being inclusive" \--- where quality matters
no more.

More seriously, some of those drawings seem more like they belong in an
article about obesity.

------
laurentdc
From the colors and font I thought it was a Dropbox landing page at first

------
rainyMammoth
This is a good summary of Google.

Self-righteous, convinced to be the best. A page full of awards to themselves
that barely loads making it de facto the worst design ever.

~~~
0x6c6f6c
Hilariously enough this page would not work in Chrome on Android. Scrolling
was totally broken. Firefox Preview worked perfectly though so I got to read
it at least.

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
Android 10 and Chrome here, site works great.

------
Grue3
I take it Youtube didn't make the cut.

