toot by @MissingThePt@mastodon.social
A sales exec at a place I worked at, asked me how companies like Apple made their products look so so much more professional than ours. Umm, billions of dollars in revenue and hundreds, if not thousands, of developers and artists, I replied. Yeah he wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box and I’m glad he retired where he couldn’t cause any more damage.
“Make it look like google.”
Sure. Do you have a billion dollars for this project? No? Okay. You get one half resource junior UI designer.
Don’t forget to mention said resource was unable to get hired at a job that paid better than your company… (which, no offense, isn’t likely to be very good if you’re having this kind of conversation)
We tended to have very expensive engineers and very cheap designers. That was emblematic of where customers placed their value and, thus, where management placed their priority in hiring.
That said, of the four designers… one went to NASA, one went to Amazon, one went to McDonald’s (leading global service design research) and then to Lyft.
They were very talented folks
The UI design of Google isn’t very hard to emulate, even by a junior frontend developer. It’s the backend that’s the really compel stuff.
I think you’re vastly underestimating the amount of research and work that goes into making Google products so easy to use.
UI isn’t just a front end development mashing their keyboard with HTML, CSS and JS. It’s hours and hours of observation, research, prototyping, pattern identification, prioritization of information, experimentation and then you create a simple white screen with one input box that does a million things.