|
Jessica,
The client does look boring, but I think it's intentional. Most of google's tools are intended to be useful rather than entertaining. Movies are supposed to be entertaining, so they have bright colors and exciting images, but imagine the same movie on a loop for 3 months sitting on your screen. Eventually, familiarity breeds contempt.
The thing which seems exciting now, after much repetition will gradually become annoying and finally repulsive.
I believe Google's interface strategy is, in general, to stay out of sight as much as possible. They use blue, the color human eyes are least drawn to (so it's a cool color vs warm like red) so that you look at the information instead of the interface. They use soft clean lines to show boundaries so that it's easy to see different sections. They don't show buttons unless they absolutely have to and they use pretty intuitive keyboard shortcuts to give you functionality.
What I love most, is the features they don't advertise. I love that the input control doesn't resize by hand. It resizes only when it needs to get bigger (ie, you type more than one line). I love that valuable screen space isn't used up with a send button that nobody uses. I love that there are no buttons for bold and italics when I can just *bold* instead.
I don't think your complaint is unreasonable. I like theming, so you can change the look to feel more personal, but I think that Google has made good default choices.
|