Who is Steering This Thing?

I have a great admiration for Google and what they do but there comes a time in the development of any company when an idiot takes the wheel.

It happened with Renault a few years back. We had a string of fine cars from them that did the job we wanted and even managed to get progressively better. Until they changed their Head of Design. He broke a perfectly good range of cars with his meddling. 

The result of his 'design' input was the 'Avantime' and the 'Vel Satis' both of which had negligible sales. But he wasn't satisfied just introducing cars which were so radically wide of the mark in design terms that no-one wanted them he also gave the rest of the product line a makeover. The Clio and Espace turned their back on the market and started to look like something out of Judge Dredd. The poor Megane gained a rear end that looked like a filled nappy. Needless to say we stopped buying Renaults and, despite their recognition that this had all been a big mistake, have never been back.

Google seem to have gained their equivalent to Renault's Head of Design and he is currently engaged in undoing as much good work as he can. Another example of this is the Play Store on Android. As with all the other Google products it has received a 'makeover'. The colours have been simplified and the layout is striving to achieve some sort of Zen state.

The problem is, this simplification once again makes the product less functional.

To start with the colours are now more uniform. There is the heavy use of areas of a single brightish colour rather like the tiles in Windows 8 to announce what the product is but after that all is subtlety. Unfortunately this means that silly little things like buttons now merge into their background. A white button on a pale grey background with a darker grey text isn't very readable when you are trying to see it on a smartphone screen in variable lighting conditions. Genius.

Just to make the task of actually using the product a little more challenging they have also tried to rationalise the layout. This has resulted in buttons now occupying a small area in the top right hand corner. On my phone, an HTC OneX, the screen is large. I like that. It means that someone with eyes my age can see what's going on. But even on my screen the buttons are only 5mm apart with a gap between them of 1mm, way to small for the fingers of most people. If these buttons were unimportant it wouldn't be too much of a disaster but the boy genius in charge of design manages to place the 'Open' and 'Uninstall' buttons together with hilarious consequences.

Renault eventually tracked down the source of their problem but not before a lot of damage was done. Hopefully someone at Google has their wits about them.