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.
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.
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.