How Google Finally Got Design
Google’s
transformation into a company that creates beautiful software is the story of
how tech itself has evolved in the mobile era.
It would have been
crazy to say just a few years ago. But today, Google produces better-designed
software than any other tech behemoth. If you don’t believe that, then set down
your Apple-flavored Kool-Aid. Take a cleansing breath, open your mind, and compare
Android and iOS.
Start with push
notifications—a crucial feature that's telling precisely because we take them
for granted. How’s Apple doing? Your push notifications appear on your
lockscreen. Careful. If you want to follow up on one but don’t
swipe exactly on the notification itself, you’ll dismiss it. Where did
it go? To find it, you drag your finger down the top edge of the
screen. Here they are: An unruly list crudded up with headers and dividers,
organized by app even if you wanted them arranged in a timeline, with nary a
hint that you tap to open an app.
Examples like these
happen everywhere in iOS, and they're painfully obvious when compared to
Lollipop, the latest version of Android. There, your notifications appear in a
drawer, again from the top of the phone. But every one takes you directly to an
action inside an app, making it foolproof to get into maps or Uber or Facebook.
There’s intelligence behind what you see: A algorithm that invisibly figures
out what notifications are most important to you, and serves those up first.
There are hardly any chances to swipe wrong. You won’t end up in a place you
hadn’t expected. In so many places, Android is so much more logical, the
details so much more alive. Tapping any button sends a wash of color across the
screen, like a ripple across a pond—a smart way of underscoring your taps,
while hiding the teensy bit of lag that occurs as you wait for app to response.
Such attention to
detail used to be Apple’s thing. Today, that distinction falls to Google. Unveiled
last year, Material Design—Google’s evolving design language for phones,
tablets, and desktop—offers relentless consistency in interactions; invisible
rules that govern everything, so that every app feels familiar; and beauty in
the service of function. It’s why so many designers will tell you, as they’ve
told me, "I just likeAndroid better." Whereas iOS is
still inching along without improving much, Google is creating a coherent,
unified language that easily scales across phones, with enough flexibility to
jump to watches and cars. "It’s not even about composing a UI in one
place," says Nicholas Jitkoff, who helped lead the creation of Material
Design. "It’s about composing interactions from one device to the
next."
Google has come so
far, despite years of self-defeating battles over what constitutes good design.
"When we brought up design at Google, people used to scoff," says John
Wiley, a
designer who, in nine years at Google, has seen the company transform. "It
made it hard for us to hire great design talent because it didn't seem like we
had the full measure of respect for design." Here’s how an organization
that once crowed about testing 42 shades of blue and called that design created
a user-savvy organization that even Apple could learn from.
Eight
years ago, Evelyn Kim was the first visual designer ever
hired on a Google product team—a graphic designer, full of Bauhaus ideals about
beauty and function, which she’d learned at the famed Rhode Island School of
Design. She arrived believing that design should change the company. Her boss,
the seminal web-designer Douglas Bowman, believed so too, and so he had her
work on his clandestine project to redesign almost every product at Google.
The
effort had a compelling logic. Google operated as a bunch of tiny fiefdoms, to
better allow new ideas to spring forth, unimpeded by bureaucracy. Thus, every
Google product team had a couple designers on hand, to prettify their creations
after the hard work was done, with little sense of greater cause.
This
created problems. Shouldn’t all of Google’s products share a design ethos? Kim
remembers one maddening example. Her team had gathered up all the instances of
Google’s own logo, across dozens of products. In that assembled galaxy, you saw
not one logo, but many, each a few pixels off. Anyone could easily imagine the
whole mess transforming over time into something as shoddy as a Chinese
counterfeit.
So
in the course of several weeks, Kim and her tiny band of co-conspirators
created a unified design language encompassing Mail, Maps, and Search, dubbed
project Kanna (an Icelandic word for "explore"). Finally, they
anxiously presented their work to Eric Schmidt, Google’s then CEO, and Marissa
Mayer,
an engineer with no design background who had climbed up to become head of
Google’s user experience. It didn’t go well. The executives were overwhelmed at
the options they were presented with. Schmidt and Mayer thought the passion
project was interesting, but it was a non-starter.
This
was the era when Mayer boasted that Google understood design, because the
company had tested 42 shades of blue for hyperlinks, to find out which one
people clicked on the most down to the decimal point. It wasn’t a design
philosophy as much as a naked fear of screwing up Google’s cash machine. The
company was focused on growth, not beauty. It was focused on speed. And so one
of the earliest attempts to instill a design philosophy at Google died.
Just
four years later, in 2011, Evelyn Kim found herself on an eerily similar
project, at the behest of co-founder Larry
Page,
who’d been reinstalled as CEO. Almost immediately, Page confidently told
Google’s rank and file that the company now cared about beauty and user
experience. For insiders, it was an almost hallucinatory moment. This was
Google. And this was Larry Page, a man who, when asked by one designer what
Google’s aesthetic was, responded, "Pine." That is, a command-line
email system common during Page's college years, whose main draw was its speed.
Page’s
answer spoke to a philosophy that still dominates in the minds of many
engineers: That the best design is no design at all, because speed is the only
metric that matters. Adding anything charming to a computer interface simply
slowed down. For many years, that made sense. In the dawn of computing, and the
dawn of the internet, it didn’t matter of the computer spat out something ugly,
so long as it spat out something as soon as you asked. This was a version of
the so-called two second rule, formulated in the 1970s: If a computer didn’t
respond within that time frame, humans naturally drifted away. For a computer
to actually augment your mind, it had to respond almost instantaneously.
Pine.
The very word represented decades of ingrained wisdom about computers. Yet in
the four years between 2007 and 2011, something happened not just within Larry
Page and Google, but in the broader culture of technology. Google’s
transformation, from a company that shut down a well-needed redesign to one
that creates beautifully designed software is really the story of how
technology itself has evolved in the mobile era.
For
the role he plays as Google’s most high-profile designer, Matias Duarte cuts an
unlikely, garish figure. With a tightly cropped goatee and gelled hair that
swirls into to a glossy forelock, he looks like the geeky younger brother of
Mephistopheles. The last time I met him, he was wearing a ruddy plaid shirt and
red pants, which was restrained for him. I’d seen him twice before in a crushed
velvet jacket spun with silvery accents, and a shirt printed with a galaxy of
swirling colors, like a well-used painter’s palette. He seems to love paisley.
When
Duarte came to Google in 2010, after leading the design of Palm's visionary but
doomed Web OS, its products were a mess: They had largely remained stalled,
design-wise. The Don’t Fuck It Up ethos of the Mayer era still reigned.
Duarte's mandate was to fix Android. But soon enough, his mandate began to
grow. Showing me a slide of Gmail, Duarte says, "It’s kind of painful for
me to look at Gmail like this. But it wasn’t that people didn’t recognize that
it was bad. It’s that Google didn’t know how to institute design."
As
Duarte himself admits, Google seems almost purpose-built to create messy
products—in fact, that was the essence of Google’s appeal to many people
working there. There was a viral web cartoon that summed everything up, in
jokey org-charts. Amazon, the creation of the hyper-structured mind of Jeff
Bezos, a former management consultant, was represented by a fastidious series
of branches, descending two at a time from the CEO on down. Apple, bent around
the vision of Steve Jobs, was shown as a single angry red dot touching a ring
of anonymous blue dots: Micromanagement and undiluted vision, both at the same
time. Microsoft, always riven by strife, was shown as separate clusters of
branches, each with a hand pointing a gun at the others.
Google,
meanwhile, was simply a bundle of lines crazily pointing everywhere, like a
bunch of pick-up sticks touching in too many places to count. Google, in other
words, was built to encourage the messiness that breeds new ideas. But that
same messiness doesn’t much encourage the coherence that marks great design.
Think
again on that cartoon diagram of Apple’s structure, with Steve Jobs as the
angry red dot. Jobs wasn’t a designer, but he did design a company built to
adhere to a singular vision of how a product should be. Even Duarte admits that
he held onto that bias. "I had this experience, that unless you’re able to
centralize creative decision making, you end up with sloppy results. I thought,
the best you could do was structure individual units," which would each
have their own designer as visionary, Duarte says. "But good luck trying
to bring coherence."
Looking
for an alternative, Duarte didn’t have much to go on. Companies that
consistently produced outstanding designs—Braun, Olivetti, Apple—were almost
always marked by CEO’s who had close, conspiratorial relationships with their
lead designers. But it’s folly trying to design as well as Apple by designing
like Apple—other companies can’t recreate its mixture of history and personal
relationships. Good design isn’t just a product. It’s also an organization, and
a story that organization tells about how it came to be.
In
Google’s case, the company probably had no choice but to make design a priority
in 2011. Owing to its relentless design perfectionism, Apple was on the cusp of
becoming the most valuable company in history. To compete with Apple’s tech
cachet, Google’s products had to be well-designed. But Page’s design awakening
reflects some broader trends in technology that have been brewing for a decade.
As
Brett Lider, Google’s design lead for Android Wear, points out, web design
during Google’s ascendance in the mid-2000s was focused on utility. Being
homegrown and DIY lent a certain credibility on the web, especially in the
valley. Conversely, most well-designed sites were marked by a painful lack of
performance. In that brew, ambitious design actually suggested a lack of
seriousness about engineering. Google’s obsession with tech geekery, visible in
details like the Android logo, and the functional but unimaginative language of
stripped down simplicity happened to fit both the valley’s DIY self-regard, and
an ancient precept in human-computer interaction: That the most user-friendly
thing you could do is to make a computer fast, because if it were fast enough,
it would hold people’s attention. Faster speeds inevitably made people spend
more time at a computer.
This
all changed, of course. Computing power eventually became a secondary draw to
user experience. That's partly because broadband exploded, making sheer speed
less of a selling point. But mobile is what really forced design to center
stage. Unlike desktop computing, which took decades to become household mainstays,
the iPhone ushered in a new era of invention that was geared toward computing
experts and computing novices—from software developers to grandmothers—at the
same time. Everyone was learning about mobile, all at once, forcing both
engineers and designers to think about usability on unprecedented scales. User
experience, once a discipline that evolved at a pace dictated by Apple and
Microsoft, was being pushed ahead by every new app that did things just a
little bit better.
Once
Page made his announcement, dominoes began to fall at the company. He tipped
the first one over, by bringing together a small group of designers—including
Wiley, who headed design at Google Search; Nicholas Jitkoff, a UX lead for
Chrome; Michael Leggett, at the time Gmail's design lead; and Kim, at Maps—to
once-again try to standardize and beautify Google’s desktop products. The
internal name for this undertaking, Project Kennedy—as in John F. Kennedy,
father of the moonshot—hinted at how strange the effort was for Google. A
beautiful product may as well have been the Sea of Tranquility.
But
with Page’s blessing, it worked: Just a few short months later, Mail, Calendar,
Maps, and Search had all been cleaned up, modernized, and brought into some semblance
of a unified UX. Not only were all those products cleaner, they also finally
shared their design principles, ranging from where menus lived to how colors
were used. And, to quite the grumbling engineers, voluminous user testing had
proven the success of the new design.
This
emphasis on consistency would eventually become the spirit of Material Design.
But perhaps the most important outcome was the personal ties that began to knit
together Google’s disparate project groups. The company’s hive mind was
starting to self-organize. In Duarte’s search for a new kind of design
organization, he hit upon two key factors: Grassroots connections and the sense
of a greater cause.
As
Kim points out, designers like her started getting better about describing what
design even was. "To convince people about design, we had to say, ‘This is
going to solve user problems.’ It’ll take less steps, or people will find that
perfect place for a romantic dinner," says Kim. "You always have to
frame it as these are the people we’re trying to help. You try to say, ‘This is
important as a company to help not ourselves but something bigger than
that.’" As Wiley, longtime head of design for Google's search products,
says, "Beauty itself has utility. That was a big part of our internal
recognition. What beauty brings to function is hierarchy, what's related to
each other, and how things are related."
Looking
back at that process, it’s striking how different it was than that when Evelyn
Kim had tried to reinvent the company’s design language behind closed doors. To
hear her tell it, the reason Google was eventually able to build a
well-designed organization was that it had failed so many times before.
"We practiced trying this so many times, we knew how to do it," says
Kim. What Kim and the others on Google’s design team had discovered was that
they couldn’t work on an agency model, where a cloistered group of designers
prepares a solution unveiled at a grand presentation. The agency model simply
couldn’t work in an organization built to foster so much autonomy. "Maybe
I’m a romantic and maybe it’s because I’m an American, but I believe in this
vision of a bunch of people rising up to together to create change. Just like
13 colonies banding together," says Duarte.
In that formulation then, Duarte would be George Washington, and his coup lay
not in commanding Google’s product teams to march in lockstep, but in
convincing them all his vision aligned with their own best interests. The
strategy wasn’t to tell everyone what Google’s new design would be. It was to
convince all the myriad product teams at Google that they were constantly
solving the same problems, duplicating each other’s work needlessly while
simultaneously not letting the best ideas spread far enough. One example that
Lider points to is an early design exploration—one that preceded Material
Design by a few months—into how animations should be used in mobile interfaces.
Looking for a metaphor to emulate, the project designers came up with the idea
that animations should work like choreography on a stage.
On
stage, if an actor walks off stage on the left, he wouldn’t suddenly reemerge
on stage, on the right. And yet that’s exactly how so many avatars within
Google’s own mobile apps behaved. On stage, such jarring leaps that defy
physical conventions take you out of the moment, suspending your belief in the
world before you. So too with the virtual world. Lider calls that insight—about
visual continuity and consistent choreography—the "proto Material
Design" that eventually bubbled up to become a guiding principle of the
finished system. By surfacing the best work of every team and working it into a
system, Duarte and his band of designers created common cause, instead of a
singular vision, which turned out to be just as unifying.
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