What makes a design "Googley"?
There have been a few rounds of discussions on Drupal UX goals/principles this past year, so I thought this announcement would be of interest to the community:
"Late in 2007, our User Experience (UX) group—which does user interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing—set out to articulate the principles that ought to guide Google designs worldwide. What are the fundamentals that all Google designers and researchers accept? Which approaches to design are particularly "Googley"? How can we encourage teams throughout Google to dream big and make smart design decisions?"
A small team gathered to discuss these questions and define the Googley Design Principles:
1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people's trust.
10. Add a human touch.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-googley.html
Their designs are nothing
Their designs are nothing special.
vision media
350designs
Print Huge Edmonton Printing Services
Design Inspiration Gallery
With the exception of Search
With the exception of Search (due to bare simplicity) and GMail, I have yet to see an app from Google thats easier to use than their competitors.
Orkut (not officially Google) is nowhere as easy to use as any of its competitors
Picasa Web Albums is usable but just doesn't provide as enjoyable an experience as flickr.
Yeah wow Orkut is a
Yeah wow Orkut is a disaster, I dont know much about it but I could not believe Google acquired it
vision media
350designs
Print Huge Edmonton Printing Services
Design Inspiration Gallery
ugh, ugh principles
Can I say the word bullshit? Lovely principles, but not really useful for anything really other then preaching to the CEO's why user experience is important. Google's products are designed great (most people like it - whether you agree with this fact or not.). I can definitely say that Gmail (for me) is easier then any other mail applications I have encountered and so is Google Analytics.
What is key to understand that the applications and stuff that Google releases is in most cases no way related to what we do, we have a application that is forced most of the time to have no primary persona's (target group) which makes it really hard to create an enjoyable "user experience" if we don't know who that user is.
We should avoid a discussion about the ease of use of Google products, because that tends to be all opinion (ie the first comment). Rather looking at some specific parts of google's applications interfaces that are interesting to apply in context with Drupal (Not stealing the interface, but interactions that we can apply).