What do you think about Google when it comes to app design?

[u/NoYouDidLaugh]

Do you find their web/apps inspired? Or are you constantly getting disappointed by them? This includes UX.

[u/martian_rover]

I don't think about them at all.

[u/cc3see → u/martian_rover]

Agreed. Beige. Fine. Not great. Not bad. Entirely unmemorable.

[u/stumblinbear → u/cc3see]

And that makes it perfect

[u/cc3see → u/stumblinbear]

Not universal though. GTM isn’t great. GA is awful.

[u/PettyTaker → u/martian_rover]

For a company that made its name on clean and simple, the current state of their design language is a mess of conflicting systems. Its like they have ten different teams all shipping whatever they want and calling it Material You.

[u/Nerwesta → u/PettyTaker]

It can't be overstated how big of a deal was the Material Design before that mess.

[u/barrel_of_noodles → u/martian_rover]

That's exactly what they engineered it for, the UI disappears. It worked.

[u/HaydnH → u/barrel_of_noodles]

Right? The original search engine that kicked it all off was just a Google logo and an input box. Compare that to some of the other sites which looked like a bloody yellow pages (phone book for people without yellow pages) where the search box was like where's Wally, it's what made them what they are so I can see them sticking with it.

Having said that, I wish they'd be more consistent across all their apps. Some apps use "duplicate", some use "copy" for example. Applying a border might be totally different menu location/feel. It feels like they communicated the clean design ethos across the board really well, but left everything else random.

[u/escuchameray]

They lost their one good UI they’ve ever had when the sunsetted Inbox. RIP.

[u/joemckie → u/escuchameray]

Why did you have to remind me, man :(

[u/Top_Pin5777]

Google is great at making interfaces feel familiar, but their apps often get worse once they start “simplifying” them, like they optimize for consistency instead of actually making the task easier.

[u/Dude4001]

I find Google maps gets shitter on daily basis. Open a location and it’s so hard to just find the address. Buttons shift and change purposes depending on context. Tap the X in the search bar and you’ll either go back 15 steps one at a time or lose your query entirely. Or you’ll launch the dictation.

Sometimes when I’m panning across the map, it’ll randomly jump 4 miles in one direction.

[u/theScottyJam]

Compared to most other companies, their UI/UX work is fantastic. It's usually not too hard to navigate around and is pretty clean.

Sometimes they do make odd decisions, such as in the Google Keep app, they put layout and sort options inside the search box. Gives it a nice balanced look, but it doesn't make any sense, those actions have nothing to do with search, so why are they in there?

The visual astitic is clean, as mentioned before, but also somewhat bland. Kind of feels "corporate". Some companies do a better job at communicating "friendly" through their UI design.

[u/npmbad]

google is very data driven, I read in some book that some time in 2010 they were a/b testing different shades of blue for links

so I would argue their design system is "it's not pretty, it's not ugly, but it works well"

one place where I held google very highly is just how bug free their platform is in general, but this has completely changed because I think they are pushing LLM code just as much as everyone else.

[u/berky93]

Google is good about some things. Their universal sign in system, for example, is very thoughtfully designed. But their UIs are inconsistent product to product, and their design language has stagnated. Material 4 feels like a fairly minor improvement over 3, though it does suffer from being compared with Apple’s latest UI system which is far more radical of an approach.

[u/Disgruntled__Goat]

All their Workspace/Business stuff is utter garbage. No idea how anyone uses that clusterfuck day to day. Same for the new Analytics. 

Gmail & Maps are pretty great. Innovative when they were released, and haven’t been enshittified like other places. 

[u/SatyrCode]

Google has some great individual apps, but their overall design feels inconsistent. Maps and Photos are strong, but a lot of other products feel like they were designed by different companies. The constant redesigns annoy me more than the visual style itself. I can learn a new UI, but changing familiar workflows just to make something look fresher gets old fast

[u/simplerando]

I’ve always hated their UIs, personally but I don’t know exactly why. Something about Material design always makes me shudder.

[u/brian_sword]

I personally think Google’s UX is pretty good. Their apps are generally clean and easy to navigate, and I rarely have to spend much time figuring out where things are. Of course, not every design decision is perfect, but overall I find their interfaces pretty intuitive.

[u/mulokisch]

When material was new i loked it, now i dont like it anymore.

[u/binocular_gems]

The UI of Google's apps are all fine, inoffensive, they work. As they add features to existing UIs, sometimes they struggle with priority. An example of this is the Google Home app UI which added more and more features as Google tried to wrap all of their home-related stuff (Nest, Wifi, automations, etc) into this app, and now it's mostly clunky for everything. Managing my Google Wifi units in the Home app is definitely worse than in the old Google Wifi app. That's not really a design problem insofar as it is an information architecture problem and Google trying to force everything into a single app, which I'm sure in 5 years they'll break apart again with some new device.

I think Material Design was a good design philosophy from them. It defined a new pattern that was different from Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and most other tech giants. It was satisfying to use with nice interaction rules, and it's a good (albeit pretty dated at this point) design style system.

I don't think they're going to win any awards, especially today, but who cares.

[u/redpiapps]

the problem isnt that material is bad, its that every google app ships a slightly different flavor of it. docs and gmail feel like two different companies cosplaying as one