The marginal generosity of Google Slides

A few years ago, my pal Jon Bell made Design Explosions, where he did some enormous deep dives into the way that specific apps work. Here is one on mapping. Note how tiny the scroll bar is.

Jon wrote some intentions of his own:

Design Explosions are written with three things in mind while we analyze the work of other teams:

1. The team that built these products are smart and talented.
2. There are many things we can’t know without joining the team.
3. Design Explosions is here to teach, not to judge.

So you’re not going to see us rolling our eyes or shouting fail. We’re going to assume that every flow and feature came into the world after a lot of debate and careful tradeoffs. In short, we’re going to give the designers the benefit of the doubt and focus on pulling lessons from the resulting design.

This is so generous and kind, it rocked me the first time I read it. I remember where I was sitting. I had to get up and walk away from the computer. What does it mean to critique technology from a position of assuming the best of others?