GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by seldo on Friday April 27, 2012 @03:12AM (#3897971)

When something is as viscerally, obviously bad to me as the new GMail UI, I go with my gut. Google has no track record of great UI that would make me question that feeling. They built the world's simplest home page not because of some profound respect for minimalism; they just didn't have anything else to put on it.

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Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by OpinKerfiBjarni on Friday April 27, 2012 @06:53AM (#3898454)

This is wrong. The minimalism of the front page was, in the early days, a point of pride and something that engineers fought for (note: I worked for Google for 3 years on a team with a fair number of old-timers).

I'm failing to come up with a link at the moment, but I remember a widely circulated bit of folklore about how an unnamed engineer within Google set up a cronjob that anonymously e-mailed the entire team a single number every day. After a while people figured out that the number was the byte count of the front page, the implication was that it was a metric that needed to be watched carefully.

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Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by sdoering on Friday April 27, 2012 @07:40AM (#3898598)

And even this seems to me to be not quite right. There was a talk, Marissa Meyer gave on Velocity '09:

http://blip.tv/oreilly-velocity-conference/velocity-09-maris...

Just watch from 1:00 to 2:00 -> One Minute will answer the question.

Here she tells the story, how the first Google Design came to live. It is quite interesting. It seems, that minimalism wasn't a rational choice and that it came to stay only, because the data proofed it to be the right lucky choice.

I can understand, that the minimalistic homepage was a point of pride. I would be proud, to minify the homepage of the company I work for.

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Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by OpinKerfiBjarni on Friday April 27, 2012 @11:21AM (#3899440)

Yeah, it's really the last point that I was making - that it was a point of pride to keep it small, even after there was all sorts of "stuff" that could be added to it. The fact that it was small to begin with was probably a combination of luck and intuition.

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Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by seldo on Friday April 27, 2012 @11:48AM (#3899589)

> The fact that it was small to begin with was probably a combination of luck and intuition.

Which was the point I was making.

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Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by rwallace on Friday April 27, 2012 @09:00AM (#3898812)

Well, these things are matters of opinion. Personally I'm happy with the new user interface. I find it works fine. (I did switch the buttons from icons back to text - credit to them for providing that option.)

As for the world's simplest homepage, that was the reason I switched from AltaVista to Google in the first place. I only started noticing the better search results after I switched to avoid the clutter.

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Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by amouat on Friday April 27, 2012 @05:03AM (#3898219)

That's not fair, they could easily have overloaded the home page with junk at any point.

They just realised that users came to google to perform a single, clearly defined task and decided the home page should reflect that.

I wouldn't argue it was "respect for minimalism" but it was respect for functional simplicity.

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