Here’s a website that I came across a while ago that beautifully expresses something that I’ve been passionate about for a long time in web and software design: flags are not languages.
Continue reading Flags are not languagesI really like these deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani.
They would make a good companion resource while reading Donald A Norman’s classic book The Design of Everyday Things.
See the whole collection at The Uncomfortable.
UPDATE: Friday 29 December 2017
Google have again updated the bookmark manager and this time it’s really rather good. It has the Material design but it now works the way I expect it to.
I’ve updated the blog title to make it clear that this post was referring specifically to Chrome 42.
UPDATE: Monday 22 June 2017
Google is ripping out Chrome’s awful new bookmark manager
Great news! Google have listened and the new bookmark manager that sparked so much panic and upset is being removed from future versions of Chrome.
For those who did like it, you can use the Bookmark Manager plugin.
ORIGINAL POST: Yesterday my copy of Google Chrome updated at work. It rolled over from version 41 to version 42. No big deal, I thought. Until I went to reorganise my bookmarks…
What the…?!
To my surprise, Google Bookmarks had gone all Material.
My initial response was positive. It looks pretty. The thumbnails look like they could be useful. And I’m generally in favour of Google’s aim to standardise the look and feel of their web applications (whether Chrome OS, web-based, or Android).
But then I tried to reorganise my bookmarks.
It was a nightmare.
As silly as it sounds, I genuinely began to panic. And then started my out-loud commentary to the rest of the office about just how awful an experience it was.
Whenever I spot something useful I quickly bookmark it to a folder called “Check out”.
Then every day or two I sort the bookmarks (A–Z) so that the sub-folders move to the top, and I can find the bookmarked page titles more easily.
Then I organise these bookmarks into 3 sub-folders:
I often bulk-select items with shift + click.
But with the new, redesigned bookmarks manager this was virtually impossible to do:
This was without a doubt the worst user experience I have encountered in a long time. It was awful. Utterly, utterly awful.
After about five minutes I gave up. Of the 40 or so bookmarks in “Check out” I had moved maybe six or seven. I didn’t have forty minutes to spare just to move bookmarks. Life is too short.
“This redesign has killed my productivity,” I complained to no-one in particular.
After seriously considering moving to another browser, I went looking for a fix… but not before writing some strongly worded feedback to Google.
Negative feedback about this new, card-style design isn’t new. It goes as far back as December.
Computer World reported it on 1 December 2014 in an article entitled, Card-style display displeases users who see it pop up in their beta builds. The article notes that
when Google asked for feedback, it got a thumbs down from most users.
My first port of call was the Google Chrome flags page (chrome://flags). This hidden section contains settings that control experimental features of Chrome.
Sure enough, it was there, so I disabled it. Restarted Chrome and sanity was restored.
What I can’t understand though is why—even after all that negative feedback in December during the beta phase—Google still pushed out this car crash of a design to the stable channel.
In the Google Material guidelines it says,
At Google we say, “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” We embrace that principle in our design by seeking to build experiences that surprise and enlighten our users in equal measure.
Well, that certainly surprised me. But it certainly didn’t address any of my user stories—it didn’t allow me to work productively. In fact, it did the opposite: it slowed me down, the interface got in the way of what I wanted to do.
I’m not unilaterally against a Material-style design of the bookmarks manager. But it needs to work more efficiently. Something along the lines of how files may be ordered in Google Drive would be a step in the right direction.
In the meantime, I’m sorry Google—I don’t often complain about your stuff—but in this case, after only five minutes I stopped your experiment and returned to sanity.
Since the net magazine rebrand a few months ago the projects section of the magazine, which is printed on a rougher paper to distinguish itself more easily from the glossier feature articles, often includes a handy guide to which browsers a particular technology supports.
The infographic shows desktop browser support on the left, mobile/tablet support on the right. But in the spirit of Steve Krug’s book Don’t me me think, the way it is currently laid out has me thinking too much. I want to know what their design reasoning is.
Here is an example from the current issue (May 2014), from an article on page 84 called “Slash design/build time with proportional RWD”:
But whenever I see this it always makes me wonder why they have not matched up the icons. What is the order being shown here? It’s really not obvious to me. It’s not alphabetical, it’s not by version number, or popularity.
Why not simply show a comparison between desktop version and its comparable mobile version, and then any left over can be arranged at the bottom?
I often find myself thinking, “Okay, so this feature is supported from Chrome version 6 onwards, but from which version of mobile Chrome is this supported?” And then I have to go hunting for the Chrome icon on the right-hand list.
Why not match the icons up, like this?
That makes it much easier for me to read. My five year old Joshua thinks this makes more sense. What do you think?
I love websites like this one, that take a real world problem, analyse it, and then offer a possible, user-centred solution: The future of airline websites.
Inspiring!