Not long after ads started appearing on the Web, there was research showing that Web browser users quickly learned to visually filter them out.
So, when Material Design came out, and it wasn't even distinguishing the extents of UI elements (e.g., transient UI object with same background as what it partially overlapped, with no border), it violated much of what we knew about HCI (i.e., in the interests of the user or task), and it looked like a brochure (i.e., in the advertiser's interests) more than anything else... Occam's Razor needed only to mutter the words "advertising company".
I know that some percentage of the people who have to work atop Material Design are doing good HCI despite it, but they're fighting against sabotage, and we all are dumber and less effective for it.
If you are a software engineer with no sense of design, do make it like Google. Material Design allows anybody to put something together that looks half decent, is somewhat consistent and familiar with users.
Funny I like the MUI React widgets for applications that are used by people who use those applications all day for work. For consumer-oriented mobile they just seem to be meant for maximum feasible misunderstanding and then some.
The good designers, yes. I'm sure there are plenty of other designers who think their opinion is better than the likely thousands of person-years of UX research that the major OS vendors (combined) have invested into their interface guidelines.
For each of the major platforms, following the guidelines will at least make your app consistent with the other apps on the user's device, which is a decent-enough baseline. Going wild and re-inventing how a drop-down should look or how scrolling should work is probably just going to annoy the user.
I just think it looks ugly, and I don't want to create a product that I don't personally like. Totally open to accessibility and using existing frameworks but not Material.
I could not disagree more with this piece. I actually quite like Material Design. Gmail does feel like the red headed stepchild mostly because it predates Material Design by a decade, and there are still many power user settings that rely on old UI (similar to the problem Microsoft has with Windows 11 nowadays).
> Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time.
I’ll do you one better: try making a chart in Google Sheets.
Incorrect. Making a chart in Sheets is mind-numbingly easy.
The problem comes (as you describe in a later post) if you don't just want a chart, but instead want a particular chart for a particular purpose. Not some weirdo crazy purpose, either; there are many ways to get into trouble trying to make minor adaptations.
Same thing with Material. It's great for making a bland clone of a thousand other interfaces, preferably one with only a handful of relevant interactables ("find the beige car" is hard when they're all beige). If you need to distinguish things that are different because they have a reason for being different -- say, labels and buttons -- well then you're SOL.
We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either.
Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors."
People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions.
UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say.
What's the alternative? I feel like I read a bunch of vague critiques without anything specific.
For what it's worth, I think Google's products are far superior to it's competitors, and I've never had issues with a site looking too Google, though I've been burned by some complex SPAs that were slow and buggy.
We can also pass off Apple GUIs as clunky and bloated by simultaneously opening every possible modal and sidebar in a manner that isn't representative of real world use, then taking a screenshot.
A curious observation. I was opposed to this article based on the title. Esp when I clicked on it and then saw it was the same author as "But what if I really want a faster horse?"
Because I assumed I knew what the argument was. I assumed this was another material ui doesn't look great -- while not appreciating the nuance of Google. Just as I assumed "what if I really want a faster horse" was actually about some anti-AI thing that just didn't appreciate how game-changing AI models are.
I pigeonholed the author based on my pattern matching of similar titles.
Then I clicked around https://rakhim.exotext.com/. Always curious about clean design. So clicked around on https://exotext.com/. Clicked on a few more blog posts of Rakim again and thought maybe they were ok. I was still a bit in pattern matching mode (stereotyping perhaps) assuming the author was like other people on Bluesky etc. Perhaps reactionary etc.
Then somehow in my clicking I saw a thumbnail of the author and I was like - oh that guy looks like me.
It's messed up it took me to this point to get there - but at least I persisted in trying to understand where they were coming from. At that point though I started to click around more and more and actually read the articles and I realized I agreed with all of them. Part of my appreciation was that Rakim had created exotext.com etc.
Just a cautionary tale to not pattern match prematurely. Premature optimization...
Though building in guardrails to prevent premature optimization is an important hack. E.g., faces really do matter in terms of slowing people down and taking them more seriously I think. And just building in anti-premature-optimization "tread" or friction for lack of a better word. E.g., avoiding click bait titles that people might pattern match on. It's not the author's fault but it might be more successful that way. Cause - really insightful blogposts. I feel like a fool for dismissing them at first. And yet I hope they get wider reach via perhaps subverting the ways we pattern match (not that I or other people should but I think based on other comments and how people pattern match on me - yet another tech bro, etc. - it exists...)
> that used to design terrible UIs before the field got a welcome injection of professionals
Care to precise when was that?
I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s. Despite looking janky, functionality was actually easily accessible.
Nowadays things may look sleek, but this comes at the price of functionality being hidden in arcane settings submenus, hamburger icons that expand, etc and so forth.
I may have misinterpreted what you meant by the "welcome injection of professionals", I just hope those professionals are not the ones to have defined the tenets of how things are designed nowdays.
> I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s.
Whether you intended or not, unfortunately this shows your bias, privilege and lack of perspective
Tech has become incredibly accessible, inclusive and mainstream because of the research and hard work of UI/UX disciplines.
The very site you're using is a benefactor of that.
I encourage you to talk to your users (if you are in a position) or folks who are less fortunate than yourself and see how this "bad design" is changing their lives.
You are talking to a user, and just dismissed his points without addressing anything by vaguely gesturing to other hypothetical users.
You see, as a developer I use things such as laptops, IDEs, spreadsheets and so on. They are all meaningfully worse nowadays because of something I consider a cardinal sin of design - "style over substance". In order to make things look pretty and sleek, functionality and usability is sacrificed.
Like it or not, you are the one speaking from a position of privilege, defending the indefensible by issuing non-statements, and disregarding valid points brought fourth by users.
Google websites are my least favorite to have to interact with by a long shot. I often struggle to find where they have hidden the basic common things I need to do. It’s like the people who design their sites are not the people that use them.
There are no other sites I find as frustrating to navigate, except perhaps zooms website/user admin console.
The pilot of the Airbus 380 is highly trained and has a set of checklists for everything they might have to do with that thing.
Google products don't intimidate me with a large number of features, rather they annoy me by hiding the features I use all the time while shoving things in my face I could care less about, expecting me to do things in the opposite order of how I expect to use them, etc. Search for "Google transit" and you don't find an entrance to Google maps optimized for transit users, instead you find a landing page that is probably of interest to 1% of the people who are searching for that
I wanna say that it is "enterprisey" in that it is certainly oriented to about 50,000 enterprises worldwide but it's got the same visual veneer of simplicity that Google likes which doesn't come across as "enterprisey"
In my mind the complexity of the AWS console is the complexity of what it controls. The patterns used in it are very standard and boring patterns for enterprise applications and if they tasked me to make an interface for that system I'd make one that looks almost exactly like it because... that's how you do it.
What gets me are applications for "creative" people. I was in this hackathon [1]
where I used Unity for the first time and thought it was nuts, the same way I'd think Photoshop was nuts if I wasn't used to it.
[1] we won! had a guy who was good at making platformers in Unity and a gal who was a good artist. I was just the startup veteran who knows the meaning of "minimum" and "viable" and how to find the intersection
One thing that really gets me is making text elements and links (or are they buttons?) non-selectable in various places. I routinely have to open devtools and inspect-element to get at some link in gcal or address in gmaps I want to copy but not open in current browser context.
Figuring out how to extract the GPS coordinates for a location (without having to deconstruct the URL or delve into devtools) after the latest UI rearrangement in gmaps has been turning into a regular a scavenger hunt...
This isn't complex stuff. With some regressions it's hard to tell what's negligence and what's actively user-hostile. My Occam's Razor is growing duller by the quarter.
They look different to Chinese people and they look more different to me than the syllables sound in speech but I've been looking at them for a while.
On the other hand, the Material Design icons are supposed to be used in mass market products that people can use right away and I can say they still look the same to me despite looking at Android on and off for more than a decade. (Chinese kids learn thousands of characters in 10 years of school!)
I agree with the author that the interface for Google Drive, Google Docs and other facets of their monolith (they're really the same system and shouldn't be presenting under different names at all) is atrocious. Google knows that I am logged in when I visit the "Google Drive" page and presumably knows everything about me [2], such as the fact that I frickin' use it for work and have no reason to ever click on "Try Google Drive For Work" -- ever!
Then there are all the twisty little things to click on the left hand side that all look the same like "shared folders", "shared with you", ... The one thing that's constant is it is always hard to find what I'm looking for whatever I am looking for whenever I am looking for it.
I've been laughing at the fanboys (or shills?) who want to get their bathroom done in Material Design or want to get a Material Design tatoo or have an Itasha [1] in Material Design. Gets me voted down a lot but go ahead, I've got the karma to lose.
[2] like that time I clicked on a YouTube short where a Chinese girl transforms into a fox on American TV and now it wants to show me hundreds of AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into everything
Notably the Google app icons commit the same sin that many multi-colored designs make in that they don't prefer any part of the color wheel over other parts in a particular symbol which makes all the symbols look effectively grey. I think of Scott McCloud's critique of the use of color in Stan Lee-era Marvel Comics and how actually the mid-2000s black and white reprints of those comics were great and affordable and showed that the color didn't contribute much.
In the case of the Google icons though they look terrible in monochrome too because the use of color might fool you into thinking there is contrast between visual elements in the icons except... look at it in monochrome and you see there isn't much.
Much to the opposite. I was disagreeing that they all look the same.
While studying Japanese, I had to learn Kanji, so I know a little about Chinese characters. I was fascinated to learn how they work, pretty amazed at how an intricate writing system was designed by combining a limited set of strokes and radicals.
These are the same type of "engineers" that used to design terrible UIs before the field got a welcome injection of professionals
My recollection is a little different. When the "professionals" showed up, that was right around the time when things started to suck. I'm sure it was only a coincidence, though.
I'm not saying Google invented any or all of these but it sounds like you don't like it the colors or font but that's different from your larger point.
Show me an instance where Google's UI is radically different from industry norms and then you'll have a point.
Some of this shit is complex and complex things look complex.
Not long after ads started appearing on the Web, there was research showing that Web browser users quickly learned to visually filter them out.
So, when Material Design came out, and it wasn't even distinguishing the extents of UI elements (e.g., transient UI object with same background as what it partially overlapped, with no border), it violated much of what we knew about HCI (i.e., in the interests of the user or task), and it looked like a brochure (i.e., in the advertiser's interests) more than anything else... Occam's Razor needed only to mutter the words "advertising company".
I know that some percentage of the people who have to work atop Material Design are doing good HCI despite it, but they're fighting against sabotage, and we all are dumber and less effective for it.
Material design was came after and was an improvement on "flat" design that gave almost no indication what elements could be interacted with.
If you are a software engineer with no sense of design, do make it like Google. Material Design allows anybody to put something together that looks half decent, is somewhat consistent and familiar with users.
Funny I like the MUI React widgets for applications that are used by people who use those applications all day for work. For consumer-oriented mobile they just seem to be meant for maximum feasible misunderstanding and then some.
The irony is that engineers are too arrogant to use material, while good designers just use material.
The good designers, yes. I'm sure there are plenty of other designers who think their opinion is better than the likely thousands of person-years of UX research that the major OS vendors (combined) have invested into their interface guidelines.
For each of the major platforms, following the guidelines will at least make your app consistent with the other apps on the user's device, which is a decent-enough baseline. Going wild and re-inventing how a drop-down should look or how scrolling should work is probably just going to annoy the user.
I just think it looks ugly, and I don't want to create a product that I don't personally like. Totally open to accessibility and using existing frameworks but not Material.
I could not disagree more with this piece. I actually quite like Material Design. Gmail does feel like the red headed stepchild mostly because it predates Material Design by a decade, and there are still many power user settings that rely on old UI (similar to the problem Microsoft has with Windows 11 nowadays).
> Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time.
I’ll do you one better: try making a chart in Google Sheets.
Incorrect. Making a chart in Sheets is mind-numbingly easy.
The problem comes (as you describe in a later post) if you don't just want a chart, but instead want a particular chart for a particular purpose. Not some weirdo crazy purpose, either; there are many ways to get into trouble trying to make minor adaptations.
Same thing with Material. It's great for making a bland clone of a thousand other interfaces, preferably one with only a handful of relevant interactables ("find the beige car" is hard when they're all beige). If you need to distinguish things that are different because they have a reason for being different -- say, labels and buttons -- well then you're SOL.
Really? It's that hard for you to make a chart in Google Sheets?
What's your preferred way? Matplotlib? Seaborn? R?
Mostly the details are a problem.
For example, adding data labels to a scatterplot. Completely insane how they want you to do it.
Or removing the Y axis from a bar chart. Have to make the text size 11 and white. Why?
There's a lot of little things like this that are just mind-numbing.
I like native PowerPoint charts (not Excel) and R's ggplot2 personally.
Would you be surprised if I told you there might be people who prefer sheets way and dislike PowerPoint and ggolot2?
These are subjective things. We can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'
We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either.
Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors."
People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions.
UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say.
</rant>
What's the alternative? I feel like I read a bunch of vague critiques without anything specific.
For what it's worth, I think Google's products are far superior to it's competitors, and I've never had issues with a site looking too Google, though I've been burned by some complex SPAs that were slow and buggy.
We can also pass off Apple GUIs as clunky and bloated by simultaneously opening every possible modal and sidebar in a manner that isn't representative of real world use, then taking a screenshot.
A curious observation. I was opposed to this article based on the title. Esp when I clicked on it and then saw it was the same author as "But what if I really want a faster horse?"
Because I assumed I knew what the argument was. I assumed this was another material ui doesn't look great -- while not appreciating the nuance of Google. Just as I assumed "what if I really want a faster horse" was actually about some anti-AI thing that just didn't appreciate how game-changing AI models are.
I pigeonholed the author based on my pattern matching of similar titles.
Then I clicked around https://rakhim.exotext.com/. Always curious about clean design. So clicked around on https://exotext.com/. Clicked on a few more blog posts of Rakim again and thought maybe they were ok. I was still a bit in pattern matching mode (stereotyping perhaps) assuming the author was like other people on Bluesky etc. Perhaps reactionary etc.
Then somehow in my clicking I saw a thumbnail of the author and I was like - oh that guy looks like me.
It's messed up it took me to this point to get there - but at least I persisted in trying to understand where they were coming from. At that point though I started to click around more and more and actually read the articles and I realized I agreed with all of them. Part of my appreciation was that Rakim had created exotext.com etc.
Just a cautionary tale to not pattern match prematurely. Premature optimization...
Though building in guardrails to prevent premature optimization is an important hack. E.g., faces really do matter in terms of slowing people down and taking them more seriously I think. And just building in anti-premature-optimization "tread" or friction for lack of a better word. E.g., avoiding click bait titles that people might pattern match on. It's not the author's fault but it might be more successful that way. Cause - really insightful blogposts. I feel like a fool for dismissing them at first. And yet I hope they get wider reach via perhaps subverting the ways we pattern match (not that I or other people should but I think based on other comments and how people pattern match on me - yet another tech bro, etc. - it exists...)
[flagged]
> that used to design terrible UIs before the field got a welcome injection of professionals
Care to precise when was that?
I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s. Despite looking janky, functionality was actually easily accessible.
Nowadays things may look sleek, but this comes at the price of functionality being hidden in arcane settings submenus, hamburger icons that expand, etc and so forth.
I may have misinterpreted what you meant by the "welcome injection of professionals", I just hope those professionals are not the ones to have defined the tenets of how things are designed nowdays.
> I sort of miss how things were design, say, back in late 90s or early 2000s.
Whether you intended or not, unfortunately this shows your bias, privilege and lack of perspective
Tech has become incredibly accessible, inclusive and mainstream because of the research and hard work of UI/UX disciplines.
The very site you're using is a benefactor of that.
I encourage you to talk to your users (if you are in a position) or folks who are less fortunate than yourself and see how this "bad design" is changing their lives.
You are talking to a user, and just dismissed his points without addressing anything by vaguely gesturing to other hypothetical users.
You see, as a developer I use things such as laptops, IDEs, spreadsheets and so on. They are all meaningfully worse nowadays because of something I consider a cardinal sin of design - "style over substance". In order to make things look pretty and sleek, functionality and usability is sacrificed.
Like it or not, you are the one speaking from a position of privilege, defending the indefensible by issuing non-statements, and disregarding valid points brought fourth by users.
Google websites are my least favorite to have to interact with by a long shot. I often struggle to find where they have hidden the basic common things I need to do. It’s like the people who design their sites are not the people that use them.
There are no other sites I find as frustrating to navigate, except perhaps zooms website/user admin console.
It's in the side menu. No, the third one. Or maybe the hamburger? Or possibly you have to click on your own picture, who knows.
Big claims but no examples. What are some complex apps that are seamless and easy?
There's a reason why a cockpit of Airbus 380 looks intimidating. Some of the complex stuff looks complex.
The pilot of the Airbus 380 is highly trained and has a set of checklists for everything they might have to do with that thing.
Google products don't intimidate me with a large number of features, rather they annoy me by hiding the features I use all the time while shoving things in my face I could care less about, expecting me to do things in the opposite order of how I expect to use them, etc. Search for "Google transit" and you don't find an entrance to Google maps optimized for transit users, instead you find a landing page that is probably of interest to 1% of the people who are searching for that
https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/
I wanna say that it is "enterprisey" in that it is certainly oriented to about 50,000 enterprises worldwide but it's got the same visual veneer of simplicity that Google likes which doesn't come across as "enterprisey"
Someone mentioned Google cloud console (or AWS console) looks crazy and intimidating.
Perhaps to a novice. But for experienced folks it is pretty ok.
In my mind the complexity of the AWS console is the complexity of what it controls. The patterns used in it are very standard and boring patterns for enterprise applications and if they tasked me to make an interface for that system I'd make one that looks almost exactly like it because... that's how you do it.
What gets me are applications for "creative" people. I was in this hackathon [1]
https://prod.cis.cornell.edu/dgas-first-game-jam-gives-game-...
where I used Unity for the first time and thought it was nuts, the same way I'd think Photoshop was nuts if I wasn't used to it.
[1] we won! had a guy who was good at making platformers in Unity and a gal who was a good artist. I was just the startup veteran who knows the meaning of "minimum" and "viable" and how to find the intersection
One thing that really gets me is making text elements and links (or are they buttons?) non-selectable in various places. I routinely have to open devtools and inspect-element to get at some link in gcal or address in gmaps I want to copy but not open in current browser context.
Figuring out how to extract the GPS coordinates for a location (without having to deconstruct the URL or delve into devtools) after the latest UI rearrangement in gmaps has been turning into a regular a scavenger hunt...
This isn't complex stuff. With some regressions it's hard to tell what's negligence and what's actively user-hostile. My Occam's Razor is growing duller by the quarter.
What the hell dude
Firstly, if their site is broken on mobile they’ve fixed it because it works fine for me.
Secondly, they aren’t trying to claim that Google is terrible just that everything doesn’t have to look identical.
Even if Google is “better” it’s cliche at this point. Why are you so angry at somebody suggesting that some sites should not look like Google?
All Google apps icons do look very similar though.
I hate that icon redesign they did a few years back. It used to be you can distinguish between Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Maps, etc. just on color alone.
So? All Chinese characters look the same to me as well.
They look different to Chinese people and they look more different to me than the syllables sound in speech but I've been looking at them for a while.
On the other hand, the Material Design icons are supposed to be used in mass market products that people can use right away and I can say they still look the same to me despite looking at Android on and off for more than a decade. (Chinese kids learn thousands of characters in 10 years of school!)
I agree with the author that the interface for Google Drive, Google Docs and other facets of their monolith (they're really the same system and shouldn't be presenting under different names at all) is atrocious. Google knows that I am logged in when I visit the "Google Drive" page and presumably knows everything about me [2], such as the fact that I frickin' use it for work and have no reason to ever click on "Try Google Drive For Work" -- ever!
Then there are all the twisty little things to click on the left hand side that all look the same like "shared folders", "shared with you", ... The one thing that's constant is it is always hard to find what I'm looking for whatever I am looking for whenever I am looking for it.
I've been laughing at the fanboys (or shills?) who want to get their bathroom done in Material Design or want to get a Material Design tatoo or have an Itasha [1] in Material Design. Gets me voted down a lot but go ahead, I've got the karma to lose.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itasha
[2] like that time I clicked on a YouTube short where a Chinese girl transforms into a fox on American TV and now it wants to show me hundreds of AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into everything
We're talking about Google app logos and not material design icons.
I think I meant the same thing as you, see
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110417985807049704
Notably the Google app icons commit the same sin that many multi-colored designs make in that they don't prefer any part of the color wheel over other parts in a particular symbol which makes all the symbols look effectively grey. I think of Scott McCloud's critique of the use of color in Stan Lee-era Marvel Comics and how actually the mid-2000s black and white reprints of those comics were great and affordable and showed that the color didn't contribute much.
In the case of the Google icons though they look terrible in monochrome too because the use of color might fool you into thinking there is contrast between visual elements in the icons except... look at it in monochrome and you see there isn't much.
"So much for the arbiter of good design"
I'm sorry, are you saying Chinese characters are badly designed?
Much to the opposite. I was disagreeing that they all look the same.
While studying Japanese, I had to learn Kanji, so I know a little about Chinese characters. I was fascinated to learn how they work, pretty amazed at how an intricate writing system was designed by combining a limited set of strokes and radicals.
These are the same type of "engineers" that used to design terrible UIs before the field got a welcome injection of professionals
My recollection is a little different. When the "professionals" showed up, that was right around the time when things started to suck. I'm sure it was only a coincidence, though.
And let me guess, you consider to be present before others showed up?
There's another term for this - gatekeeping.
There's another term for this - gatekeeping
There is irony there that does not sleep.
> Google’s actual UI & UX design is terrible
Absolutely. I have long mentioned that Google got lucky that the initial search was a textbox on a white screen and nothing else.
If they had tried to do a portal or something like Yahoo! they would have failed miserably.
Till today, I haven't seen a good design from Google for anything complicated. Just look at what a mess Gmail is for instance.
Great engineers, horrible product and design folks.
I don't even understand the logic.
All search engines look like Google search
All calendar apps look like Google calendar.
All maps app look like Google maps.
All email clients look like GMail
I'm not saying Google invented any or all of these but it sounds like you don't like it the colors or font but that's different from your larger point.
Show me an instance where Google's UI is radically different from industry norms and then you'll have a point.
Some of this shit is complex and complex things look complex.
Google search is literally the first search engine doing that.
Gmail is the first email client that arranges conversations like that