[moopark]

... Marissa actually proved to be good at it.

Except that, as far as I can tell from the vast majority of Google's products, Google (perhaps not Marissa?) has a design sense that ranges from "poor" to "incredibly poor". Chrome, perhaps, being a singularly notable exception.

[idoh]

They've been pretty key in advancing the state of the art^, so I don't know how you can say that. Maybe you don't have a sense of history.

^: I'm talking about search, mail, and maps specifically.

[moopark]

These are technological advances, not design advances.

As for "not having a sense of history", that's a strange ad hominem, but I'll lend it a response:

- I was on the internet when there was only gopher (from terminals at the library).

- I was also on the internet when Netscape 1.0 was the shiny new thing (and the 56k frame relay I used to download it was considered quite fast).

- I used Mapquest, Altavista, and Yahoo, but before that, I used people's random collections of favorite links that you found on their home pages.

I don't lack perspective on history, but I don't equate Google's technological improvements in "advancing the state of the art" with overall quality UX design. The minimalist home page was brilliant in comparison to Yahoo at the time, but it's not an aesthetic they've been able to continue to apply successfully.

Google consistently produces fantastic technology, lackluster design, and then rarely, a design outliers that is actually good.

[nostrademons]

I'm curious - where do you draw the line between a technological advance and a design advance?

Apple, for example, is usually held up as an example of awesome design. But behind Apple's design is some pretty impressive technology. Why is this different than Maps or GMail or Websearch? Is it solely due to reputation, because Apple hides many of the technical details of its products behind this cloud of secrecy, while Google is openly proud of having advanced technology?

[moopark]

Actually, (and as a former Apple engineer) I'd say Apple is barely acceptable with most technology but absolutely fantastic leveraging that technology to produce amazing product designs.

What Apple technology in specific do you think is so advanced?

[nostrademons]

My impression (as someone not an Apple engineer) is that much of the iPhone hardware is pretty impressive, their visual skin layer is awesome and does some truly impressive computer graphics to get high performance on battery-constrained devices, and a lot of the MacOS underlying tech is pretty solid.

I'm really quite curious as to where you put the dividing line - my impression (as a Google engineer who works frequently in UI) is that there're a lot of really subtle design decisions in both Search and Maps that are nothing more than HTML/CSS, but really improve the usability of the product.

[idoh]

Every once in a while some company comes out with a really great solution to a problem. The most recent was with hipmunk and flights. When I used hipmunk for the first time, I had that feeling that after them, the whole landscape had changed.

I got the same feeling when I saw google maps - it was so far ahead of everyone, and not just technically but design-wise too. The same thing happened with mail. So on one hand you could say that their maps and mail are sort of standard, and that other companies have similar offerings.

But on the other hand, who set the standard in the first place?

[moopark]

Slippy maps are great. The UX was a great idea, but it was almost entirely dependent on having the technology and infrastructure to implement them, including asynchronous map tiling client side.

I don't think that is in conflict with my original statement, and the remainder of the Maps API is truly bad. I regularly make the mistake of using the scroll wheel, get stuck trying to figure out how to show (or hide) street view, etc.

Regarding GMail -- it's a poor approximation of an existing, very basic desktop experience. There's not a lot of design innovation there, if you look beyond webmail.

[leoc]

But Maps' UI is atrocious for anything beyond the most basic tasks.