Building Windows 8 is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs to follow.
I probably won’t agree with all of UI choices being made with Windows 8, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to gripe about when it finally comes out. But the one thing you get from Windows 8 blog is that Microsoft spends a lot of time thinking about their UI choices and trying to make their users happy. For example, the team uses a good chunk of this blog post to explain concepts like Fitts’ Law and minimizing the amount of time to launch an app. Arguably, some of the “big picture” stuff gets lost with this attention to very specific metrics. But you get the sense that a lot of care is going into Microsoft’s Windows 8 UI.
Contrast this to Google’s new UI changes.
One of the most atrocious implementations of the Google’s new gray, black, and red theme is the new Google Reader. I’ll defer to criticism from folks more familiar with the product. But suffice to say, the new Google Reader redesign raises the question of whether anyone on the team actually put the product in front of real people.
I remember stories about how how Google conducted massive amounts of AB testing on even tiny changes to the interface. Engineers would analyze each extra link on google.com or use of a different shade of blue. Guess that’s not being applied across the board.
I get the impression that Google’s UI team really wants to be like Apple. Like there’s some creative overlord that just imposes “freshness” and “good taste” across each of Google’s products in a consistent manner. Well, I don’t know how Apple works. But whatever it does, Google’s doing a piss poor job at imitating it.
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