The Perils of Assuming Google is Good at Design

Listen To Me And Not Google

Heydon Pickering, from his critique of Google’s Material Design:

Here’s the thing: Google are not successful because they know how to design inputs. Astonishing, I know, but Google are not the artisan purveyors of fine forms for which you may have mistaken them. They make their money by other means.

This isn’t a new problem, either. While it’s great that a company will ‘dog-food’ its own products to prove that they work, that just proves that it works for them. Failing to take the needs of your users or customers into consideration, or worse still adopting a not-invented-here attitude, is just storing up problems that could come back to bite you, hard. Microsoft should know that by now. So should Apple.