I’m really liking Google’s design lately. Even though people would say, “It’s ugly and stripped down or whatever.” The decisions they’re making I think are really wise. Everything’s based on speed. And the more you use it, the more you realize speed trumps aesthetics in most cases. If you can be fast and good looking, that’s great. But I think I’d almost prefer fast.
And so, I like some of the decisions they’re making about that. And I think that’s starting to influence us a little bit in terms of picking up some speed here and there by maybe doing things that are a little bit less fancy than we might want to do, a little less arty than what we might want to do, but really just are better because they’re faster…
The way I tend to do it is I’ll design something the way I like it, and then I’ll figure out how I can pull stuff out of it. So, for me, it’s more an editing process. Speed is about editing for me. I want to get the idea out there first and then I can start peeling back.
PJP
on 08 Sep 10Totally agree. Speed, on the web, should be our primary concern. It’s all about speed and usability. Provide a user with an awesome service, with all the stuff he needs, with only one drawback: each page takes 15 seconds to be served. And then, look at you users go away…
val
on 08 Sep 10yes. If you know Nielsen’s website useit.com then this is like plain usability without appealing design. if you take google, then it’s got both. of course you won’t find art pieces of contemporary design here, but thats more a pro than a con.
Deltaplan
on 08 Sep 10I think Google can afford it… because they are Google.
By which I mean, they can afford to look under-designed at first sight, because people know them already, people are used to go to google, etc…
Use the same tactics on an absolute unknown website… Many people will have this reaction : “this site doesn’t look professional enough, let’s get out of here”.
Or in other words… being fast and reliable is a good way to keep your users happy… But not necessary a good way to attract new users.
alex
on 08 Sep 10Speed? Have you used (LOADING) gmail (LOADING) lately (annoying unsaved changes error when you try to close the window)?
Jakup
on 08 Sep 10Maybe that’s their excuse since they can’t make things sexy (like Apple for example). But on the other hand I agree that it is wise decision to pick speed over looks.
Remi
on 08 Sep 10@alex : Have you tried using any other webmail lately (like the new Hotmail, for example). Gmail IS fast. Sure, not desktop fast, but definitely Internet fast.
ML
on 08 Sep 10being fast and reliable is a good way to keep your users happy… But not necessary a good way to attract new users.
How do you think Google attracted all these users in the first place?
Geof Harries
on 08 Sep 10I think, too often, people get the phrase “good design” mixed up with “good aesthetics”. Many of Google’s products are well-designed simply because of their speed, efficiency and usefulness, not how visually appealing they are. As you point out here, velocity can matter more than additional, low-value graphical treatments, depending on the circumstance.
Nazik Huq
on 08 Sep 10I was happy with speed until I had to create a corporate website with with Google Sites and then I wasn’t happy at all. You can’t really create a professional website with the templates they have. And if you want to insert any CSS then inline is the way to go. Not acceptable.
Jeremy Meyers
on 08 Sep 10“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -Antoine de Saint-Exup’ery
Deltaplan
on 08 Sep 10@ML : they did not attract users because they were faster than their competitors, they attracted users mostly through word of mouth from happy users… and it took time. Most websites wouldn’t survive such a strategy, indeed many websites did quite the same and did NOT survive at all, because they never achieved enough momentum to keep building a user base slowly.
And it’s especially interesting to see that Google is the least used in countries where the internet connexions are the slowest… In many African countries for example, Yahoo is still omnipresent, most people there haven’t even heard of Google.
Which goes back to what I was writing, Google did not attract users by being fast, they rather managed to keep their existing users that way, and progressively those users have brought other users to Google, and so on… and it was not by luck that they achieved such a user base, it was mostly because they answer a very basic (and therefore, widespread) need.
But for more “niche” websites, such a strategy is – IMO – suicidal. Making your customers happy is useless if you don’t have enough customers to sustain your business. Loosing potential customers because of the way your product looks isn’t something anybody can afford.
Scott
on 08 Sep 10Speed conquers all. Once you use a web app that is fast – like “instant fast” – you will never go back to a competitor no matter how well designed, feature-rich, or implemented the slower web product is. Each second you wait for the web app to respond you will be thinking “this thing is slow, I’ve got work to do, what’s the problem?”. That dissatisfaction with the speed will directly impact your overall impression of the product.
W3M
on 08 Sep 10I agree. People go online to find something because online, the world is at their fingertips at the speed of light. This is not to say good aesthetics don’t matter, because they do. But in the end, it doesn’t matter how good your aesthetics are, if they take a minute to load the user has already moved on. It’s better to have a clean, minimalist, if unimpressive design and be fast than to have an example of web art that takes minutes to load.
Scott
on 08 Sep 10Which is why I’m excited about Rails 3.1 flush plans! Bring on the 3.1 awesomeness!
http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/07/automatic-flushing-the-rails-3-1-plan/
Anonymous Coward
on 08 Sep 10You know what else is fast? The Pagani Zonda!
Michael Leggett
on 08 Sep 10@alex @remi Gmail should be faster than (average) desktop fast. It should be Chrome fast. In some places, Gmail is faster than desktop. Add to the loading time of Outlook the time it takes for your mail to download and spam to be filtered out. I bet Gmail wins. But that isn’t good enough. Gmail should be faster. Much faster. I’m glad you expect more. I’m glad you don’t think it is good enough. It is what keeps us trying harder. And I promise… we are working to make things much faster.
@nizik Sites is more of a tool for creating wikis on steroids than corporate websites. I think the product name is misleading and I’m sorry to hear you had a poor experience.
@deltaplan It isn’t enough to be faster than your competitor. You have to leap frog them. Wow users AND be lightening fast. I think we’ve attracted users by building products that make people feel like rock stars. Search did it. Maps did it. Gmail did it. Build products people love and they will spread the word for you. I think building something beautiful can also enhance the emotional connection people have to products. But it shouldn’t be at the cost of speed IMO. And with HTML5/CSS3, it is increasingly easy to do both.
@jason fried – thanks for the hat tip. What products have you been digging the most lately? FWIW, instead of editing back, I prefer to start with the bare minimum, build it, use it, get others to use it in their lives (aka dogfooding, trusted testers, etc), and see what essential bits are missing. There are always some “must have” features that aren’t really that must have.
Dylan Bennett
on 08 Sep 10@alex Try the “Inbox Preview” feature in the Labs section of Gmail. Then it shows you a preview of your inbox while Gmail is loading. I love it because then I’m already visually processing in my head what mail I have, even before the interface has loaded.
Dimitar Yanev
on 08 Sep 10Sorry, I’d agree to that post 5 years ago, but not today. I’d rather sacrifice a 100k sprite image in the name of good aesthetics.
qwerty
on 08 Sep 10Google is obsessed over speed, A/B testing, and anything that is easy to measure. But the blandness of their design is straining me, I am missing a human and artistic touch. Don’t lose your design foo by becoming too much like Google!
jd
on 08 Sep 10For the opposite, check out MailChimp: absolutely excruciatingly thick UI. MailChimp needs to strip out 90% of the pixels on every page in the service.
Hashmal
on 08 Sep 10When millions and millions of people use google, several times a day, you can’t take the 37 Signals approach and say “if you want to make everybody happy then nobody is gonna be happy”. The more people use your products, the least you can be artistic.
Motambo
on 09 Sep 10@deltaplan – that was a fantastically racist comment. “most of Africa” what a load of BS. I deal with hundreds of clients accross Africa and most use gmail for personal email. We have fibre and one of the largest cell usage in the world on this continent. Keep your racial short comngs to yourself.
Johan Strandell
on 09 Sep 10There is a difference between minimal design and just stripped down, and Google’s designs tends to be the latter.
See for instance Khoi Vinh’s redesign of Gmail (to their credit the Gmail people implemented these changes fairly fast, once this was posted). Speed and aesthetics aren’t necessarily at odds: you can optimise for speed and still produce a non-ugly design.
But I suspect that some of Google’s aesthetics comes from a desire to emphasize this (false) dichotomy; by leaving the graphics fairly rough and unfinished you get the impression of them having stripped out everything unnecessary (like an unpainted car), and that they were in such hurry that they didn’t have time to think about the design.
Rien
on 12 Sep 10Google’s Identity, is it non-design? With a brand of the year in 2002 Google probably has some of the poorest ‘designed’ logo any multinational would ever choose to have. Adrian Shaughnessy describes it as follows in his article: “The use of a soft-drop shadow, and the chamfer-effect on the letterforms themselves, turns it into a DTP classic: the sort of hybrid creation that tech-heads choose for the front covers of reports. In truth, the logo is weedy, corny and ill-conceived. It’s the same with the Google homepage — a brutal display of functionality. Clearly, no graphic designer has been near it. Compare it to the home pages of other large corporations, and its obvious that Google has avoided hiring slick design companies and serious branding consultants. It looks like they’ve just gone and done it themselves.”
But there is something charming about this non-design. Why is it so successful? People seem to love it. Adrian Shaughnessy hits (in my opinion) the nail on it’s head: “We’ve reached a point, in the homogenized West, where good graphic design is everywhere. The battle has been won: every business knows it needs good design. [...] But the consequence of all this feel-good business is that design has become, more often than not, a badge of mediocrity. The old Modernist dream of good design standing for rationality and human values has been flipped. Today, good design is little more than a cosmetic agent, an obscuring agent. [...] The urban environment is now over-designed. It’s all too branded, too inhuman. “
I think Google positions itself very well by maintaining this ‘design accident’ and not choosing for a ‘standard’ well designed corporate logo. After all Google is (from a users perspective) a search engine, not a corporate company. And a search engine doesn’t need a corporate logo.
I wrote more about this on my blog.
This discussion is closed.