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A few thoughts: * Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes

A few thoughts: * Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies. * You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users. * Existing users are inherently conservative. By definition they mostly like things as they are or they wouldn't be users. You have to weigh their needs vs. those of future users. A big part of that is understanding how many people are upset about the change (all vs. vocal minority), how quickly they get used to it (if ever), and how you can mitigate this. * Ideally, you want to make "Pareto efficient" changes, that make everyone better off. The only thing easier than doing what you've always done is when the new UX is so easy and intuitive you instantly understand it. * You do not want to version your UI, just like you don't want to make everything a setting. This is a recipe for maintenance headaches, and endless wasted cycles supporting an ever-shrinking minority of users. * This being said, it's very helpful to release a redesign as a beta, and let users switch back and forth for a while while you iron out the kinks. This in itself gives you good data. At the end of the day, design is all about trade-offs. It's very easy to criticize a change because you don't like it, but it's a lot more interesting to think through why a change might have been made. If we're going to be critical, let us be constructive.

snowwrestler 12y ago
Google is currently making a number of design changes to bring products in line with their new "Material" design guidelines. These changes may or may not be in response to actual usability issues. The hypothesis is that an overall design consistency across Google products will improve overall usability over time. However, this is still just a hypothesis. It might turn out to harm usability on some platforms while helping on others...or harm usability across the board. Adherence to a standard is not necessarily the same thing as a usability improvement.
declan 12y ago
> You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users. Well put. Google is a data-driven company with the ability to test designs over millions of users (although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users). I've spent quite a bit of time implementing Material Design for http://recent.io/ http://recent.io/, and then testing the design with normal, not especially tech-savvy users. My impression is that Material Design is a way to simplify and standardize app UIs (to increase app usage overall), and import visual cues from the paper world. It's very thoughtful approach, probably better than iOS, and I say this as someone whose primary mobile device is a new iPhone and who has owned an iPhone since the day it went on sale. But what works for most people may not work for HN power users. Hence the complaints on this thread.
- aggie 12y ago
  > although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users This gets tossed around a lot, but is usually misinterpreted. What 5-10 users will get you is discovering the mere existence of most usability problems. What much larger sample sizes will get you is an idea of how many people are likely to experience that problem, which is very helpful when talking about trade-offs in meeting the needs of various types of users.

snowwrestler 12y ago

Google is currently making a number of design changes to bring products in line with their new "Material" design guidelines. These changes may or may not be in response to actual usability issues. The hypothesis is that an overall design consistency across Google products will improve overall usability over time. However, this is still just a hypothesis. It might turn out to harm usability on some platforms while helping on others...or harm usability across the board. Adherence to a standard is not necessarily the same thing as a usability improvement.

declan 12y ago

> You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users. Well put. Google is a data-driven company with the ability to test designs over millions of users (although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users). I've spent quite a bit of time implementing Material Design for http://recent.io/ http://recent.io/, and then testing the design with normal, not especially tech-savvy users. My impression is that Material Design is a way to simplify and standardize app UIs (to increase app usage overall), and import visual cues from the paper world. It's very thoughtful approach, probably better than iOS, and I say this as someone whose primary mobile device is a new iPhone and who has owned an iPhone since the day it went on sale. But what works for most people may not work for HN power users. Hence the complaints on this thread.

aggie 12y ago
> although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users This gets tossed around a lot, but is usually misinterpreted. What 5-10 users will get you is discovering the mere existence of most usability problems. What much larger sample sizes will get you is an idea of how many people are likely to experience that problem, which is very helpful when talking about trade-offs in meeting the needs of various types of users.