I thinks this guy is missing the point. Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent. They are now executing those grand-design rules.
In the end, apps should be more familiar, and easier to use.
The change itself is always frustrating, people who are used to an uix (by learning it), hate change, even if the new uix is simpler.
> Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent.
It will be like everywhere else. Someone wanted to change stuff to make their mark and found a way to get survey results that confirmed their decision.
> Google did uix research and come up with a more usable design philosophy, which makes all apps more consistent. They are now executing those grand-design rules.
That's all well and good, but they seem to do this every two years or so.
Thats indeed a good point. The question remains. How often should you redesign your app? Sometimes an innovation (such as touch screens) forces you to rethink the uix.
How does eliminating the limits between keys improve the keyboard? How does eliminating the small symbols overlayed on the keys (for example I can type "!" by holding the A key) improve the keyboard?
I think the guy has valid points, and your post is just an appeal to authority.
Sadly it's not only google, it's also Microsoft (Windows 8), Gnome (3), Ubuntu (Unity), etc. This UI minimalism consisting in removing features with no good reason is killing me.
There will be Windows 10 (Windows 8 is really a big mistake). Use Cinnamon, Mate or XFCE (or KDE even). Use another Keyboard on Android or change the theme on the official Android keyboard to old Holo theme (yes, possible).
I think Unity's brilliant. My new test for desktop environments is to press the super/win key and then type the first three letters of an app I want and press enter. If a DE can't respond by opening the intended app then I don't use that DE. I don't know about OSX, but Windows, Unity and Gnome 3 all work that way. KDE Plasma and Gnome 2 don't.
Well, they can go back to the drawing board and do some more research. This was an example posted here a few weeks ago, by a heavy Calendar user. Look at the old and new app and see if you can answer a common question for a calendar user, like when do I have some free time in the next month: http://imgur.com/a/Qo91p
Also, not that it matters, but the old app is 2 MB and works flawlessly, the new one is more than 20 and chugs a bit when scrolling on a quad core processor.
It's also become incredibly difficult to scroll properly in the new calendar. I constantly find myself scrolling horizontally when I want to scroll vertically, or vice-versa; it is maddening.
If they put colored sections indicating appointments around the circles in the latter example, as if they were 24h clock faces, it would be even more useful than the first example.
Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products.
This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.
The underlying problem is dev time gets wasted on cosmetic updates while basic usability issues are ignored.
Whatever OS you pick, there are elements that are simply wrong.
I have a particular loathing of iTunes for its many persistent idiocies, but I could just as easily pick examples from Windows or Linux world.
Designing eye-candy is much easier than designing good application work-flow - and it's the latter that defines the UX.
It's baffling that this is either not understood or ignored by so many product managers.
Or maybe not - if you research app design books you'll find a huge amount written about coding conventions and ideas like MVC, and quite a lot about HI standards and graphic design, but (relatively) almost nothing about workflow design.
> This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.
I do not think that necessarily follows. Even if you are not the customer, they likely (think they) are designing it for you. Because they need you to keep giving them your data, they need you to find the UI easy to use and easy to hand over data.
Data is easy for them to get since, you know, they control the OS behind your phone and will get the data anyway.
The new Google Maps UI is fucking custom tailored to showing you advertisements. It's much less useful now for things like driving directions or finding businesses that don't pay for sponsorship (i.e. if I search for "Rite Aid" from my house, it shows me a Rite Aid 3 miles away instead of the one literally 50 feet from my front door.)
Those things may be all true, but are unrelated to the point I was responding to, which was your invoking the "if you are not paying for it, you are the customer" meme.
Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising.
If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away.
I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.
In the end, apps should be more familiar, and easier to use.
The change itself is always frustrating, people who are used to an uix (by learning it), hate change, even if the new uix is simpler.