Column view cut its teeth on NeXT computers…

…and blossomed on early versions of Mac OS X…

…but where I thought it really shone was the first iPods:

This was perhaps the most fun you could ever have navigating a hierarchy of things; it made sense what left/​right/up/down meant in this universe, to a point you could easily build a mental model of what goes where, even if your viewport was smaller than ever.

It was also a close-to-ideal union of software and hardware, admirable in its simplicity and attention to detail. This is where Apple practiced momentum curves, haptics (via a tiny speaker, doing haptic-like clicks), and handling touch programmatically (only the first iPod had a physically rotating wheel, later replaced by stationary touch-sensitive surfaces) – all necessary to make iPhone’s eventual multi-touch so successful. And, iPhone embraced column views wholesale, for everything from the Music app (obvi), through Notes, to Settings.

Well, sometimes you don’t appreciate something until it’s taken away. Here are settings in the iOS version of Google Maps:

I am not sure why the designers chose to deviate from the standard, replacing a clear Y/X relationship with a more confusing Y/Z-that-looks-very-much-like-Y. They kept the chevrons hinting at the original orientation – and they probably had to, as vertical chevrons have a different connotation, but perhaps this was the warning sign right here not to change things.

I think the principle is, in general: if you’re reinventing something well-established, both of your reasoning and your execution have to be really, really solid. I don’t think this has happened here. (Other Google apps seem to use standard column view model.)

This is a typical iOS Gmail dialog that allows you to snooze an email so it resurfaces later:

If you invoke that function on an email that’s an order receipt, a new option appears:

It’s great to see this clever and thoughtful button which is likely the best option here. But:

• It reshuffles everything else, preventing motor memory from building. At this point, you can no longer rely on “bottom left” to always be “custom date,” and so on with other buttons. (One idea would be to put it at the back but draw attention to it visually, or at least make it span the entire row.)
• It doesn’t show you the inferred date, even though there already is a precedent for doing that – especially important here as the feature seems to be powered by AI, which can get things wrong.
• The icon heavily promotes the AI association, which is not that useful. It would probably be better to show a truck or some other visual signifier of “delivery.”

I have been enthralled with this tiny feature in Google Sheets called “Show edit history,” which premiered in 2019:

Mind you, it’s not unconditional love. The execution feels a bit clunky, showing the edit values in a pop-up rather than in situ, with formatting that feels too heavy, and an awkward “No more edit history” state rather than just disabling the button.

But! Just its very presence here is delightful. Version history is often this huge, comprehensive, perhaps disorienting mode you enter that by design deals with the entire file. It always feels like a longer trip:

But edit history reimagines the feature from the perspective of the cell. You can just peek inside, quickly and effortlessly. Right click menu, a few arrows, I learned what I needed, and I barely even moved my hand. It’s a perfect example of the rule “to make something feel faster, make it smaller.” It’s like picking your newspaper at your doorstep in your pajamas rather than having to dress up to go to the newspaper store.

(…he said, dating himself and perhaps also thinking of The Sopranos for some reason.)

This kind of reimagining of something that already exists (see: undo send in Gmail) can be really hard, and I don’t even imagine Google Sheets was the first with this idea – but for me seeing this remix was eye-opening, and it inspires me to this day.

In 2009, there was a strange one-off build of Chromium with a guy’s face in place of the close box:

If I remember the story correctly, this was neither a bug, nor an Easter egg, but instead a joke’y punishment for not delivering the correct asset on time.

This menu in Chrome feels like a surface running away from its creators:

I think cerebrally I understand the subtle difference between Show and Always Show, but is that difference worth it? Because at some point the repetitiveness and heaviness of that top section is casting a huge shadow over the rest of the menu.

I have an internal rule for adding a new menu item that happens to result in the longest string yet: think about the volume – the literal amount of pixels – you’re adding to the whole surface. Big menus are scarier, wide menus separate items from their shortcuts, submenus become harder to jump into, and so on. The economy of words can benefit in more ways than just the obvious ones.

But what made me a little nervous were the two grayed out options. What does it mean for something starting with Always Show to be grayed out here? What does it mean for something to be grayed out and enabled? My guess is that someone wired these without thinking too much about all the states, but it results in a stressful tension. Software should be making it very clear about what is under my control, and what is not.

Lastly, and this is almost funny: Full Screen is either 􀆪F or ⌃⌘F, in all standard Mac apps. This alone is already confusing, as is Apple’s entire horrible Globe/Fn strategy (this is a story for another time), and I verified they both work independently in Chrome. How did they get conflated into one shortcut from hell is probably a really interesting bug somewhere – but also a sign no one is seemingly paying attention.

I recently learned of the OG App from 2022, which offered an ad-free, simpler experience to users frustrated with Instagram changes.

The app didn’t last – it couldn’t last – but it was a fascinating statement.

In a different corner of the internet, Michael Leggett, one of the former Gmail designers, created Simplify – an alternative “shell” to Gmail:

Hundreds of improvements (small and large) to streamline, simplify, and enhance Gmail’s design and functionality. Hide the features you don’t use, customize the ones you do including setting the list and message width and fonts.

It seems this attempt is not running afoul of any Google rules. I enjoyed reading about the project more on its website, especially this bit:

Bad design can occur for a number of reasons including but not limited to:

• Our needs as users are not well understood, prioritized, or aligned with the company’s goals.
• Entropy: The natural decline of products over time as the vision decays or blurs and new features are conceived without consideration of the whole and added faster than the system’s overall design and architecture can evolve to support them.
• Good design is hard. Good design is more than making a product pretty. It is about having the right capabilities in an intuitive, respectful, and well-crafted offering. I hope to expand on this topic in future posts.

I know ad blockers and “reader modes” exist, but these alternative shells go much further and change the original app’s design. I wonder what other examples of that are out there.

The state of menus on Google’s search result page: all inconsistent, most ugly, ignoring UI mechanics learned decades ago (for example understanding the importance of diagonal movement or supporting mousedown-drag-mouseup in addition to just clicking), with easily triggered buggy states, bad animations, and even clicks falling through.

I wouldn’t be so angry, but I use – or at least see – these all the time. I wouldn’t be so angry if we hadn’t learned how to make GUI menus well 30 or so years ago.

I don’t want to pin it all on browser makers; if the designers and engineers cared above, there are ways to make great menus in custom JavaScript. But I wonder why the web tech didn’t evolve quicker to provide well-built and stylable and accessible primitives for this kind of stuff. I would love to understand more why that didn’t happen. Even scrollbars and sliders still feel unfinished on the web, and those are much easier than multi-level menus.

Also, Gemini:

Are the mechanics of menus on google search page working well?

In terms of technical execution, the mechanics of Google’s menus are a masterclass in Interaction Design (IxD). They are designed to feel “snappy” even on low-powered devices, using a blend of instant feedback and carefully timed animations.

Skynet would probably love Papyrus, too.

A wildly fascinating 12-minute video from the always-hilarious YouTube channel Map Men about the reason for a surprising black spot that could be seen on Google Earth until 2012.

Reading the Wikipedia entry after watching the video adds extra color to the mystery, turning it more squarely into a “software quality” story:

Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist, since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, which reported an elevation of 1 metre (3 feet) over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land.

I was surprised at this little thing that appeared in my Chrome Canary this morning.

It is rare to see an interface clean up after itself this way. This flew by quickly and wasn’t communicated very well, but I believe this changed my new tab page from this…

…to this:

Now, I said “surprised” and not “delighted” not just because the implementation felt a bit rough. I am also suspicious of the motivations, as Google’s sister iOS app played very fast and loose with this surface, literally moving the search bar from under my thumb in order to create room for features I would never use and could never remove. I suspect this is a preparation for something else that would take the place.

But until that day comes, this was an interesting gesture, and it’s really welcome to see a new tab harking back to the simplicity of Google from days past.