Not long after ads started appearing on the Web, there was research showing that Web browser users quickly learned to visually filter them out.<p>So, when Material Design came out, and it wasn't even distinguishing the extents of UI elements (e.g., transient UI object with same background as what it partially overlapped, with no border), it violated much of what we knew about HCI (i.e., in the interests of the user or task), and it looked like a brochure (i.e., in the advertiser's interests) more than anything else... Occam's Razor needed only to mutter the words "advertising company".<p>I know that some percentage of the people who have to work atop Material Design are doing good HCI despite it, but they're fighting against sabotage, and we all are dumber and less effective for it.
If you are a software engineer with no sense of design, do make it like Google. Material Design allows anybody to put something together that looks half decent, is somewhat consistent and familiar with users.
What's the alternative? I feel like I read a bunch of vague critiques without anything specific.<p>For what it's worth, I think Google's products are far superior to it's competitors, and I've never had issues with a site looking too Google, though I've been burned by some complex SPAs that were slow and buggy.
I could not disagree more with this piece. I actually quite like Material Design. Gmail does feel like the red headed stepchild mostly because it predates Material Design by a decade, and there are still many power user settings that rely on old UI (similar to the problem Microsoft has with Windows 11 nowadays).
We can also pass off Apple GUIs as clunky and bloated by simultaneously opening every possible modal and sidebar in a manner that isn't representative of real world use, then taking a screenshot.
Every article that criticizes some general UI thing, like the general state of current user interfaces, how everything was better 10/20/100 years ago, how the start menu or settings in some operating systems are bad, ... really should be forced to provide some actual examples and analyze them in some detail. All we get in this article is a screenshot of Gmail, resized to a small size so that we don't even have a chance to decipher anything on it, and the repeated assurance of the author that this does in fact represent an unusable UI.<p>But even I, as someone who doesn't use Gmail, can quickly understand that interface on the screenshot after zooming in a bit. Maybe it looks a bit chaotic, but there seem to be some menus opened just for the sake of argument. Maybe this UI is incredibly powerful? Maybe they didn't dumb down the interface, which is something that is also criticized here a lot. It's hard to tell from a screenshot alone.
I feel like the article is completely unconvincing when they give GDrive as an example of bad design without going into specifics, then give Apple as an example of good design, then fail to comparatively examine how iCloud offers a better UX
> Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time.<p>I’ll do you one better: try making a chart in Google Sheets.
A curious observation. I was opposed to this article based on the title. Esp when I clicked on it and then saw it was the same author as "But what if I really want a faster horse?"<p>Because I assumed I knew what the argument was. I assumed this was another material ui doesn't look great -- while not appreciating the nuance of Google. Just as I assumed "what if I really want a faster horse" was actually about some anti-AI thing that just didn't appreciate how game-changing AI models are.<p>I pigeonholed the author based on my pattern matching of similar titles.<p>Then I clicked around <a href="https://rakhim.exotext.com/" rel="nofollow">https://rakhim.exotext.com/</a>. Always curious about clean design. So clicked around on <a href="https://exotext.com/" rel="nofollow">https://exotext.com/</a>. Clicked on a few more blog posts of Rakim again and thought maybe they were ok. I was still a bit in pattern matching mode (stereotyping perhaps) assuming the author was like other people on Bluesky etc. Perhaps reactionary etc.<p>Then somehow in my clicking I saw a thumbnail of the author and I was like - oh that guy looks like me.<p>It's messed up it took me to this point to get there - but at least I persisted in trying to understand where they were coming from. At that point though I started to click around more and more and actually read the articles and I realized I agreed with all of them. Part of my appreciation was that Rakim had created exotext.com etc.<p>Just a cautionary tale to not pattern match prematurely. Premature optimization...<p>Though building in guardrails to prevent premature optimization is an important hack. E.g., faces really do matter in terms of slowing people down and taking them more seriously I think. And just building in anti-premature-optimization "tread" or friction for lack of a better word. E.g., avoiding click bait titles that people might pattern match on. It's not the author's fault but it might be more successful that way. Cause - really insightful blogposts. I feel like a fool for dismissing them at first. And yet I hope they get wider reach via perhaps subverting the ways we pattern match (not that I or other people should but I think based on other comments and how people pattern match on me - yet another tech bro, etc. - it exists...)
> Google’s actual UI & UX design is terrible<p>Absolutely. I have long mentioned that Google got lucky that the initial search was a textbox on a white screen and nothing else.<p>If they had tried to do a portal or something like Yahoo! they would have failed miserably.<p>Till today, I haven't seen a good design from Google for anything complicated. Just look at what a mess Gmail is for instance.<p>Great engineers, horrible product and design folks.