So he says he hardly knows anybody works for Google and yet he is making strong generalizations about all of them, without giving a single example?
Am I the only one who finds simplicity and functionality on design more important than other factors?

wow, someone seems angry. I disagree quite strongly with Joe, although I feel biased in my option & Joe's site _is_ pretty (I like google's rssReader & gMail most, methinks)

So he's saying that you should just do whatever a designer says just because they "know" they're right? What if you have two designer that "know" two different things are right? If it unmeasurable how can you tell what to do? Flip a coin?

ghosttie That's what makes design difficult, the artistic / creative aspect of UX and visual design make it difficult to objectively pick between two valid options. Which painting is better, the da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Von Gogh's Irises? You get the same problems with architecture.

Of course you *could* measure user experience by picking metrics that you believe reflect the comfort a user has with the system (maybe time spent between clicks, number of undo's – whatever). But the results of those objective tests may lead to something with less appeal.
  
In the past, I've found this often comes down to a combination of intuition, testing, and trust. Trust that the tests are effective, and trust that the designer's intuition is good.

Design is often a lesson in counter intuitive discovery.

Designs most often draw attention away from the very thing you are supposed to be drawing the eye to. There is a time and place for flashy graphics and most designers have a tendency to be more artistic and often stray into creating cool art, forgetting about the content which is where the attention belongs.

Youtube.com for example, would not create a better user experience by creating a flashy, artistic design. The whole point of the site is to put your eye on the videos... which is why there is no design. Google wants you to search and give you great results and keep you coming back for great search results so they can sell ads which is their bread and butter. Yahoo has long since tried to make yahoo the center of your universe while offering mediocre search results... which is why they have always been so far behind google.
  
Just the opinion of a designer and web entrepreneur

Butch Decossas

> The whole point of the site is to put your eye on the videos...
> which is why there is no design.

Design!= flashiness. The Google homepage, for example, is very carefully designed. Minimalism is a valid design choice :)

Google does care about design, but they make it subservient to functionality. You, the designer, might have a great looking design, but if the tests show that people aren't doing what you want them to, then sorry, your design is no good. Google is a primarily a search engine, so that function has to be its primary focus, and intuition is no substitute for real world observations.

Rants should not be posted, they don't help advancing any debate, they should be ignored, undone, not commented, not reposted. But since blogscoped looks for any controversy about google no matter how petty, uninformed, angry, dumb, there you go we are discussing it. Stop echoing, start filtering. The debate itself between approaches to design is very interesting, it's just that defaming googlers doesn't add anything to it.

Design is not always the artistic design. Sometimes it is creating a set of rules that make e.g. using an interface consistent between parts of an application.
Google is especially bad at this, there appears to be no user interface design guide their programmers should use when creating their new features.

As a result Google applications – think e.g. Google Docs – appear glued together – with different kinds of glue – and present the user with interfaces that force the user to constantly hunt menus, buttons, links, icons, shortcut keys and context menus – often masquareded as other design elements – for the features they need.

My point is: Google is adverse not only to artistic design, but also to consistant interface design. And IMHO the latter is worse!

Certain of Google's properties have very strong design.
Google Search, GMail (without Labs), Youtube (sometimes) and Google Reader are quite good and internally consistent. They can be a pleasure to use.

Others, not so much, despite AMAZING functionality (iGoogle, Books and Docs).

Google's main problem is design across its product lines. Blogger, Youtube and Orkut are supposed to have their own identities. I am fine with them being completely different and fresh.

It's just that, aside from some splashes of blue and gray, I can't get a Google "vibe" across their rich product lines. I think they need formal Human Interface guidelines like Apple, Adobe and Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) do, for anything that has official Google branding on it.

But they won't, because design isn't a HARD science, it is a healthy marriage of art and science. I still expect flashes of occasional brilliance though.