Gadgetory

Google has released some pretty beautiful iOS apps lately like YouTube Gmail and maps how'd that happen there's only one way to find out head to the campus talk to people made the apps and figure out just how Google upped its design game if you pull the Guler on the street you'd be more often to find that they're on an Android phones and an iOS phone just nature if we make Android but there is there's a lot of iOS users I'm constantly surprised how many Googlers you talk to and ask which platform I use they'd pull out two phones one for me Thalia a volver well I have a corporate phone I have a personal phone I have a tablet I actually I also have a nexus 7 for reading books but as at home in 2011 Larry Page became the CEO of Google and he issued a mandate redesign all of the major apps they called it project Kennedy and the crazy thing is that it worked Google doesn't have a Johnny I've who dictates design across all of its products but they found a way to make everything that they do on iOS and Android relatively consistent and also very pretty on the day that Larry became CEO he also said hey everyone we're gonna redesign all of our car products oh and we need to do it by this summer there was a previous endeavor to do this it was called kana it was a bit of a bottom-up approach and we came up with a really a series of really interesting great designs but we it was hard to get traction because again you kind of have to mobilize and the entire company to make it happen you know historically at Google I think there were pockets of designers or you know there are teams that they're like oh let's bring all of Google together into one you know beautiful amazing design right but they were they were sort of because of the way that Google's set up again for speed right you know there's this dependency fact we want to lower dependencies on products so that they can move fast it was kind of hard for any one team to push that Google wide so really require the vision of someone like Larry who can rally the entire company to make it happen Larry Page didn't take the traditional route he looked outside Google's Mountain View campus to New York City where the company runs an isolated design studio called Creative Lab it's known for producing Google's famous Parisian loves Superbowl ad and an innovative Arcade Fire music video that utilized Google Maps lead designers at Creative Lab worked with Google product designers to work out a sharp modern take on applications like search and Gmail some of these same design ideas seem to have found their way to Google now on under the direction of Matias Duarte Google traditionally not really well known for design but it's really changing Google passionately cares about design and the entire company is transforming itself around that idea Google now is a great example in so many ways to talk about design and the rise of design culture in the way that design works at Google because design is not just about making things more useful it's not just about making things more beautiful it's about really figuring out what is the right thing to make and how to make it right when Google now began it was really this this mandate in this vision from Larry that that Google could be better than instant that Google could be almost psychic and this was you know very shocking provocative direction and and and definitely scary and disturbing but it's a very different way of thinking about product it's not like oh we're working on a feature we've got this idea of we're going to add these little incremental things it was a vision and that was awesome and and then the job of the designers was like okay how do we get there what can we do with that vision design is really about kind of and I like to think of it as practical imagination imagining possibilities and making them real so one of the essential parts of that is to do it like you just have to do a lot of it iterate a lot look at everything and only when you've done it done like every possible variation that you can think of then you realize oh there's actually one thing we didn't try let's try that this is different explorations about how we'd actually render the context header we were trying to decide like should the context headers you know be photography should it be tight illustration should it be this watercolor illustration right like we tried a lot of different things we we created context headers again in this very brushy look and we thought oh this looks beautiful looks amazing on the screen but again it's a little bit off from from from the Google brand we tried something a little bit more technical then it's just felt a little classy right so so this is like just the kind of level of iteration we go through like what if we do the Google box with the holo style entry field right it doesn't feel googly enough right you know their challenges associate with building apps for any platform that isn't your own here's the issue with iOS you want your apps to look like Google apps but feel iOS native the strategy initially was to get a presence a gmail presence on iOS so you know looking at the raw materials that we had to work with what we started with was the web version of G of Gmail for the phone and we took the pieces of it that needed to be native and we made those native and built an experience on the phone I think when you look at the the app today it's still based on those the same underpinnings but just a huge amount of work has gone into making it fluid making it really responsive and then on the visual design side so I think everyone is reacting to recently really making great strides in evolving what Google's visual design aesthetic should be on iOS well you know when a judge in Google five years ago there was no such thing as a common design language for for a platform and I think we've made a huge progress over the last few years and especially on iOS you know when the users noticed that they read appreciate the recent redesigns and you know when we launched Gmail 2-0 when we launched Maps when we launched YouTube and YouTube 1.1 and YouTube capture we got a lot of this positive feedback of users talking about consistency of visual language and and Google actually being able to find its own language for iOS Google succeeded in creating a host of mobile apps that all adhere to one cohesive personality at least for now it seems to be working if you go back to like kind of the original iconic homepage why is it this clean white surface where do we where do we kind of take what's great about Google design and try to express it in many more places and we wanted to have the same level of simplicity that Google always had we worked very closely with John Wiley search team and we got together in this giant war room and just churned and mashed and just you know iterated we would just kind of go through it endlessly just debate and look and create mock-ups and talk about them and go through that process and then as we launch these changes to Google as we launched them to Google products we wanted to keep up that momentum I'm the lead for Mobile Maps and I talk with the people who work on desktop maps but I also go and we have meetings with the people who are working on various iOS maps and we'll just have a very casual get-together but on a regular basis to talk about like we have for each other and things we've tried and really it's about what's freshest and best of all the things that we're working on so everybody can somewhat selfishly like have that in their product too we don't have like a single mastermind designer it's all about teams iterating together and talking and sharing information making sure that at some point we're kind of ending up in the sweet spot where our design language is very similar it fits well into the platform but at the same time it keeps big Google