Gmail and Reader go BOOM!!!
Oh Google... what did you do... how did this happen?
Did you hear? Google updated their Google Reader and Gmail applications this week to use the same interface consumed by Plus. We'll leave the whole native GMail app on the Ipad thing for now (completely different topic). Google gets points for trying to go the way of the common look and feel between their applications but loses massive points for applying it blindly.
In my first summer co-op job I worked for a local government department building their first website, inside of a department (which was inside of a department, inside of another bigger bigger department, etc, etc). Everyone loved it, it looked great, accomplished what the internal users wanted it to do and met the needs of our external user base. Before we deployed it, we were stopped and told to completely change it to follow the common look and feel standards of all the other departments and it morphed into something that did not address the group's needs and looked completely different (but the same as everything else).
So is Google like some great big, unmoving government agency now? Probably not, but 20 minutes of QA probably would have saved the backlash they got this week. Let's look at each app.
GMail
Take a look at how I "get" to configure my calendar in GMail after applying one of the themes... see it... barely... I even highlighted it for you. But you say that is just the theme, well I have news for you, it doesn't get *much* better, and really why provide something that looks like garbage and is completely unusable just for the sake of saying you have choices? With all the themes in Gmail there are only 2 I can really use before gouging my eyes out.
Things don't get much better with the main view, it looks like a bunch of colours on a page, compared with what I had before, it looked like an inbox that I could easily orgnize my email with (also notice the prominence of ads at the top of the page now). So my inbox got crappier, but my ads got more pronounced? Notice where I circled below, the CSS style does not completely line up.
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Here is what I had before I went to the "New Look";
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Here is what I have now (I kid you not);
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Seriously... the inbox is bigger on its own (same emails), the adds are more pronounced and the top email does not even apply styles correctly? I have predominantly used the web interface for GMail, because up until now, no other apps could measure up to it but this past week has me seriously considering re-installing Thunderbird.
Reader
Um... well... what's to say... it's really white with these light coloured buttons all over the place. I can't really remember what Reader use to look like, although like GMail I do remember more broad colours and outlines to what I was reading - I could easily process the beginning and the end. I guess the appearance of a scroll bar for my feeds was a real annoyance so now I get this hover thing which comes in and out so that's not too bad. Did someone just learn how to do this little trick? Is that the new blinking icon thing? What is interesting is the Subscribe button remains constant all the time, but it is probably one of the least used buttons in reader. I'm not adding 25 new feeds a day, every day, I have about 50 feeds (which even then I feel is a lot to manage) and this button is always there. What is curious though is why does this button stand out but the most commonly used ones do not? Again, the page looks like Plus, but Plus is showing a lot more different information - friend photos, chat navigation, stream information at the top, whereas Reader does not. So right now I only have to deal with this very blaise style which I think is ok I just have to atune my eyes to figuring out grays from whites.
So what happened?
When designing something fresh and brand new there is something you ALWAYS need to do - run it by someone, run it by friends, family, your dog - get feedback. And if you start getting - "Oh yeah it's great, you're the best, I want to lick the colours off the screen" - dig deeper, what do you think of this button, what about this colour, what about this icon. Find the guy/gal who are critical about everything and put them in a room with your app. They are the people who will help you elevate your app. I worked with this guy who was not a UI developer but he understood UI and when he first saw one of our new WPF apps, he ripped it to shreds and logged 30 bugs in the span of an hour on top of sending out a massive email missive to the whole team on what the application was missing.
And with that we found our GateKeeper, a good gatekeeper will wound your pride and make you ship a better product, a bad gatekeeper lets you ship useless themes and updates that make the app worse then it was, but will tell you that you did a great job.
What is so sad about this whole roll-out is that this is the card that Microsoft has been throwing at Google in the "Cloud Wars" for the past year - rolling out updates with no thought to the impact on users. To date, I never got the argument, never cared about all the changes that I received (which I always took as nice enhancements to the individual products). But with this move, Google has played right into that argument and given Microsoft a gimme on the platform deployment from.
Hopefully this isn't an easter egg "splatter job" that Google has thrown out at us, and if so... nice work Sir Google, nice work indeed.