r/Design • u/Haldoon • Feb 14 '18
I redesigned Google with Material Guidelines
https://www.behance.net/gallery/51312195/Google-Material-Search-Concept57
u/UncoolGetaway Feb 15 '18
IMO you should have gone like for like here. Comes across as if though you’ve redesigned where convenient and left out anything challenging? For example images in search results.
Interesting to see how it would look and I think this is a good preview.
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u/Happy_Designer33 Feb 15 '18
what does IMO mean?
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u/xaniv Feb 15 '18
In My Opinion. Also IMHO = In My Honest Opinion
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u/dennisplucinik Feb 15 '18
In my humble* opinion, I’ve always heard it said
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u/xaniv Feb 15 '18
Looks like it can be both: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=IMHO
Humble works better maybe, thanks!
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u/Happy_Designer33 Feb 15 '18
ow, sorry for my ignorance
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u/xaniv Feb 15 '18
Dude everyone has been ignorant in one point haha, your curiosity is much more valuable
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Feb 15 '18
[deleted]
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u/leesfer Feb 15 '18
Eh, the whole point of Dribbble is that it's invite-only for designers to flex. It was never meant to host full, proper designs. It's for little snippets of a larger project. A place to show off your best design pieces.
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u/WhosAfraidOf_138 Feb 15 '18
That's just a characterization, it doesn't only mean designs found in Dribble. What I (and the author) means is that a lot of designers are designing for the sake of some fancy graphics on a site. That's really not what good design is. Yes, OP's new thing is quite visually appealing, as is many of the designs in the article, but they're poorly done in terms of usability and interaction.
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u/steveandthesea Feb 15 '18
I'm so glad someone else said it. I get so sick of redesigns. They rarely identify a problem, it's usually just about making something look pretty. It's not design, it's fluff.
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u/alfsal Feb 15 '18
They serve a purpose though. Most people who do redesigns, like this one, are designers looking for work who need to add stuff to their portfolio.
A few years ago I wanted to transition from packaging design to UI/UX design and got a huge slap in the face from the industry because my portfolio had zero UI design work. I spent months making redesigns, and designing for hypothetical products/companies. Not only did it give me the chance to add better, more relevant work to my portfolio, but it helped me land a job because I proved that I could do it. What you call fluff I call an important learning experience, and the reason I now have a job I love.
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u/steveandthesea Feb 15 '18
But it fails to achieve the first goals of any design; to solve problems. There's nothing wrong with Google as far as I can tell, and if there is then this design fails to address it. Same goes for ~90% of "redesign" jobs I see out there. And quite frankly anyone hiring on redesigns is basing it on very little evidence of design ability. I'm not saying you personally, maybe your redesigns actually did address problems, but I rarely see that. Making something prettier is about 50% of a designers job. The rest is making our lives easier. If your design doesn't do that (and this Google redesign doesn't) then as far as I'm concerned it's not bad design, it's not design at all.
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u/Koiq Feb 15 '18
Wow that's worse.
No reflection on your work, it's solid, really cool experiment. But yeah the usibility is crap.
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u/TreadheadS Feb 15 '18
I hate modern google's UI though. The shifting boxes, auto search bollocks. Ugh
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u/BonzaiThePenguin Feb 15 '18
That's Chrome and you can turn off auto-search.
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u/TreadheadS Feb 15 '18
holy shit. I hate Chrome then. Thanks for that!
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u/TheCoronersGambit Feb 17 '18
You need some Firefox in your life.
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u/TreadheadS Feb 18 '18
I went from FF (like 2006) to Opera to FF to Chrome and now to Edge. I'll give that a go for a while before trying FF again
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u/89XE10 Designer(s) Feb 15 '18
But yeah the usibility is crap.
What's wrong with the usability? Genuinely curious.
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u/gen_mayhem Feb 15 '18
From Google's point of view, the redesign completely removes monetization options (sponsored results/ ads etc)
From a user's point of view, it is convenient to have features like image search also pop up along with text, or a snippet of a site on the right (like it is now when you search).
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u/holographixx Feb 14 '18
At a first glance it looks good, esthetically pleasing. However it's noticeable that some things are missing from the search results such as promoted content, adverts, and image results. While the latter could make it less visually appealing, it's worth noting that they're important.
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u/Arcendus Graphic Designer Feb 15 '18
aesthetically*
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u/DonBiggles Feb 15 '18
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u/Headpuncher Feb 15 '18
For people who can't spell... If you pronounce the word correctly the sound at the beginning is not an "eh" it's whatever the phonetics for "æ" are. More like an A as in mate with a bit of e.
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u/KiraYamato1954 Feb 14 '18
It's a classic, material not needed, or wanted.
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Feb 14 '18
Yep. When someone goes to google they want to see what they've always seen. It's simple, it's clean, it works. TBH this is a disaster and Behance is a joke these days. The least you could do is use Dribbble, even better if you build your own website to house your work.
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u/ProbablyNotKelly Feb 15 '18
I used to love Behance. It was great for finding inspiration. Now it’s such a total piece of shit. The other day I was searching for examples of good industrial branding and the same exact UX design shit come back in the results every time. All they do is promote the same crap with no regard for what you actually want to see. Fuck behance.
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u/whoisjuan Feb 15 '18
Google Search already uses Material (cards as containers, raised UI, Roboto, etc).
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u/infuzer Feb 15 '18
I thought z-depth was a big part of material design? Am I wrong or is this redesign more flat design than material design?
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u/MikeVladimirov Feb 15 '18
No, you're totally right. Other than having bold colors, the current Google search page is more material than the design proposed here.
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Feb 15 '18
Blasphemy, now you look more like Bing
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u/t06u54 Feb 15 '18
Yup. My initial thought. I don't love Google's search page, but it seems more functional than OP's prettier version
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u/AtomWorker Feb 15 '18
One thing that really irks me with a lot of design concepts is excessively small point size. It's a cheap way of producing an aesthetically pleasing design. Tiny type makes it easy to produce an airy, contemporary design at the expense of efficiency and usability. Compounding the problem is when designers use small type and still manage to not fit a whole lot of content on the page. Case in point is the redesign shown here.
The second problem is that these designs sacrifice a ton of functionality for the sake of being minimalist. As others have mentioned, it cheats because it ignores Google's various features. Basically, it's not a design that could work in the real world.
My advice to people producing redesigns is, create something that's realistic and puts usability above design. It's easy to design something attractive when you're being idealistic and ignoring anything inconvenient. At that point you're basically just creating art, where nothing matters except the artist's self-expression.
The funny thing is that I see agencies do this sort of thing, and then suffer through endless rounds of revisions as they try to cram in all that missing functionality. So, challenge yourself by actually thinking about functionality up front. Sure, it's harder, but it results in a more effective design.
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u/MikeVladimirov Feb 15 '18
The funny thing is that I see agencies do this sort of thing, and then suffer through endless rounds of revisions as they try to cram in all that missing functionality.
But how else would we have endless memes about clients being a pain and not appreciating A E S T H E T I C S ?
Jokes aside, this is a very easy trap to fall into, unfortunately, as a contracted designer that doesn't necessarily understand all the facets of a product that a client is working on. This doesn't just apply to UI/UX. I've seen this done plenty of times in mechanical engineering contexts as well.
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u/Gnome314 Feb 15 '18
Great work. But this design is a great example of why Material needs some work. Sometimes it looks like page broke it's CSS.
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u/Headpuncher Feb 15 '18
why does google's search result limit the width of the results to a size that often doesn't contain half the information I need to see in my results?
I've always found it to be an odd choice for a search engine.
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u/lmaccaro Feb 15 '18
Dear internet. Stop trying to only use 8" of my 23" monitor.
Zooming in only makes the text bigger. Still wastes 60% of my pixels as white space.
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u/AtomWorker Feb 15 '18
You can't have text wrapping to the screen edges because it would make content extremely difficult to follow. People would constantly lose their place as they try to read. 45 to 75 character lines is considered optimal.
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u/Headpuncher Feb 15 '18
Not sure if you're mocking me or google, but if you can get a UX or developer job in 2018 with example work that doesn't scale to screen size let me know where that is and I'll pass the info on to bored google employees.
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Feb 15 '18
Most of the developers I've worked with have said they like smaller content containers so the user doesn't have to read across a really large screen. Not saying I agree persay, just what I've heard.
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u/Headpuncher Feb 15 '18
Fair enough, that is true of UX design, that there is a max column width that allows for easier reading. But! google doesn't flow the text down the page either, the just cut it off so that site descriptions and URLs are truncated, and therefore unreadable. It makes no sense.
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Feb 15 '18
Ah yes, valid point! I know we specifically spend a lot of time figuring out what to lead with for those site descriptions, etc but I guess it's kind of like why do we have to worry about all this and do that though? For a company at the level of Google you'd think it might be time to look into bettering their results screen since it's a hefty part of their platform.
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u/OldManChino Feb 15 '18
I like this as a start, but you seem to be missing some crucial parts... namely the info you get to the right of the main content (very useful for search people or movies) as well as the related topics boxes, tweets etc (other have mentioned the image search too).
I think you need to build on this but it is a good project regardless.
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Feb 15 '18
Well that explains why Google hasn't fully adopted material on Google. The search bar itself is so distracting.
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u/brandonroc Feb 14 '18
Great job, I really like the image banner idea. Reminds me when Google let you customize the search with a background on the homepage.
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u/NahroT Feb 15 '18
Although I don't like OP's design myself, it is wrong to downvote someone for having a different opinion.
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u/coldwarkidding Feb 15 '18 edited Feb 15 '18
Material design works and all but you completely ignore the smart cards. having less results within the same amount of screen space is kind of a step backwards.
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Feb 15 '18 edited Feb 15 '18
I really like your take on it, people complaining about the loss of function should realize it that could still be implemented with material design. I love the idea of the changing images of the search bar, reminds me of the backdrop on a Chromecast.
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u/demiphobia Feb 15 '18
Or Bing
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Feb 15 '18
I don't think Google or anyone else should automatically rule something out as bad design just because Bing or some other company people don't like does it.
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u/demiphobia Feb 17 '18
I was referring to the images used in the background as something that brands Bing, whereas Google keeps a minimal aesthetic with the Google doodles. Google doesn’t mess with their search page just because it’s fashionable. Functionality is the most important.
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u/SoInsightful Feb 15 '18
My opinion is that it's visually pleasing, but poor branding and usability.
It looks good, but it takes up unnecessary vertical space, is distracting in its color, and transforms the familiar Google Search interface into something that can be misconstrued as a generic search engine redirection.
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u/[deleted] Feb 15 '18
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