GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width.<p>Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster.<p>Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be <i>very</i> reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.