
Ask HN: Is Google failing at UI/UX/design simplicity in its products? - palashkulsh
The 2 google products which I have to frequently use are gmail.com and chat.google.com. Google chat has very bad user experience. And so is the new gmail update Which focusses so much on fluffy design that it diverges away from simple yet powerful gmail.tasks in gmail are unhandy now. your thoughts!!
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bsvalley
I believe Google is relying way too much on data rather than using basic and
common sense. It’s been like this for years. They don’t apply proper UX rules
per se, hiding crucial features (by literally making them almost impossible to
find) is probably their main weakness. Youtube, obviously gmail, now even
google search is hard to use. Data is great but don’t rely 100% on it! Use
human brains...

~~~
chewz
On Android you have Google Home App which lets you manage your Google Home and
other Cast devices but to set some options you need Google App. Just an
example.

It is either deliberate dark pattern or just pure idiocy. In my opinion it is
the second. Google is just a rudderless ship on so many levels that I feel
sorry for them. And this accumulating randomness is hurting their business and
their future prospects.

Google is in dire need of real managers and leaders not just some clever guys
who got their jobs by solving riddles.

~~~
bsvalley
And when you need to use multiple google accounts it shows all the weaknesses
in their products. Singing out from an account and signing in to another
account on the same machine generates a security email all the time. If you
have 3-4 different accounts for instance that’s a lot of security emails in
your inbox every day.. I’m sure there’s a way to deactivate this thing but it
would take me about an hour to figure it out.

~~~
sonnyblarney
This is a fiefdom issue I think - there doesn't seem to be an overall product
strategy at G that creates a kind of coherence, it's loose, at best. It's a
hard thing to do, but if either of the founders or Sundar made it a priority,
it would happen. Few companies are good at this, even Apple seems odd, I get
confused sometimes between iTunes, AppStore, iCloud yada yada.

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kmarc
Cluttered, inconsistent, and very sloooooooo...

So this week I visited Google Cloud Summit where a googler overheard that I
just migrated away from gmail web UI for it's slowness. He walked up to me,
corrected me, told me my laptop is slow, and GMail is fast. I showed him
[http://bit.ly/gmail-slow](http://bit.ly/gmail-slow) but he insisted it's fast
and sleek and perfect. Then I was asked to show him on my own laptop right
there, it took a good 15-20 seconds again to load and be able to start writing
an email. ¯\\_(シ)_/¯

...oooooooow

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jjpe
They're failing, and hilariously so. The Gmail GUI is awful, it's slow
(especially on non-chrome browsers), you're still being tracked (nothing new
but still worth mentioning) and manipulated. And worse, the slowness thing was
done for (allegedly) anti-competitive reasons.

Then there's android and chrome: the new material design style is something
you need to be a little brainwashed to really like, as a _lot_ of space is
simply wasted on eye-searing white backgrounds.

And finally, let's talk about search, Google’s raison d'etre. It's
consistently dropped in quality. For example, a number of years ago I'd never
even think about going to page 2 or even 3, or even going to another search
engine. But now it's par for the course, since page 1 is just chock full of
garbage e.g. advertisements (nothing new, but still) and links that don't even
come close to providing the answer to my question.

Quite frankly, properly justifying staying with Google is starting to get
seriously difficult.

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volandovengo
Overall, Google at the very least has published their Material Design
guidelines that are very good.

[https://material.io/design/](https://material.io/design/)

That said, I'm annoyed that they are shutting down inbox. The UX of it was
amazing.

~~~
rchaud
Google's own websites use Material design guidelines extremely sparingly if at
all. Material Design is most commonly seen on Android apps, and that's usually
because app developers aren't interested in customizing the look and feel
beyond the bare minimum.

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chrisper
The design I hate most about google is the delayed moving UI. Like I am about
to tap something and something pops up and I tap on something else. So
frustrating.

~~~
anonuser123456
This 100 times.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I have unknowingly archived about a dozen mails by clicking them in my inbox,
and unwittingly pressing an archive button that 'just appeared' beneath my
cursor.

The odd thing is - these are well known anti-patterns in design!

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ASalazarMX
Without googling, do you know where you organize your contacts in the new
gmail update? It wasn't intuitive before, but I think it's even less now.

~~~
sprt
Yeah, after 10 seconds I just gave up and navigated to
[https://contacts.google.com](https://contacts.google.com)

~~~
thibran
I too navigate to google products by typing in the URL instead of using their
UI.

~~~
pier25
If anyone uses Alfred on macOS I have a workflow to access a lot of Google's
services:

[https://github.com/PierBover/AlfredWorkflowGoogleApps](https://github.com/PierBover/AlfredWorkflowGoogleApps)

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edanm
Thinking about it as "Google failing", as if Google is in practice a single
entity that can be failing or not at its UI/UX, is probably the wrong way to
think about it. Google is built up of many, many teams - some of them will
prioritize UI/UX, some won't, some will be good at it, some won't, etc.

Of course there is some amount of influence that the culture and internal
processes of Google exert on its product teams, and I'd argue that it was
never really that good at UI to begin with. But I still think it's usually a
bad idea to think of a company as a whole, because people will start playing
the "but look at _this_ product's UI" game, which isn't very productive.

~~~
palashkulsh
agreed, that its not a single entity. UX is far more important to users than
UI in my opinion. Google's UX used to be good but now I've experienced its
shortcomings in many of its updated products.

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CM30
Yeah, and not just in the more visual elements either. Gmail is a perfect
example of them ignoring 'if it's not broke, don't fix it', but I think the
main problem is how they're so obsessed with trying to 'guess' what you want
rather than let you decide yourself.

This is especially notable in Google Search, where the results will often be
outright irrelevant to your query, remove terms they assume aren't necessary
and do absolutely everything on the assumption that a wrong result is better
than no result.

So many of Google's UI/UX/design issues would be fixed if they just got out of
the user's way and let them do what they intended rather than trying to guess
in advance.

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superasn
Google's updates are hit and miss. Yes gmail is slow and bloated but I've just
noticed an incredibly update that lets me write my email by just typing a few
words (its ai autocompletes the rest for me.. how incredible is that?)

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roberttod
Tried to get my Google home setup to call people. It takes 3 different apps on
my iPhone to configure it, Google Home, Google Assistant and Google Voice. In
the end I couldn't get my contacts to sync so gave up. One should not need a
tutorial to do this sort of thing.

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rayvy
_waits 5 minutes for gmail to load_

Yes

~~~
josteink
_looks at a big screen filled exclusively with flat text and flat, non-
descript icons on a big, flat white background_

Yes.

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catacombs
Yes, just look at Gmail. Not sure the same can be said about Google
Docs/Sheets. Those programs, within the last few months or so, have become
hilarious sluggish and, sometimes, barely usable.

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anuraj17
Even look at Google Drive. The UI is terrible and slow

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sxp62000
I still love Google Search, Google Fonts, Google News, Trends and those little
widgets they do for sports scores especially during tournaments like the FIFA
World Cup.

Things I don't like: Google Analytics (don't think I'll ever truly understand
that interface) and more recently Gmail. Sometimes clicking on links on
gmail.com does nothing for 2-3 seconds!

~~~
palashkulsh
true,

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sebazzz
I have another example. We have Google Apps for a client. So sometimes a
security notification comes, when you check the admin panel security reports
you find nothing. When you log in as the particular account, you get the
actual security notification.

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lowlevel
I find all google products difficult to use or figure out what the are doing.
Many things are non-obvious and not easily discoverable. Not Snapchat bad, but
pretty bad.

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askthrowaway
Let's add Google Play Console to the list, I spent a whole day trying to
figure out how to publish a beta version.

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buboard
adsense is far worse. in fact everything revamped to cards interface is
insufferably slow and superfluous.

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teaneedz
when was google ever good at UX?

~~~
josteink
It may be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when every web-based
product google made seemed like amazing, fluid pixie-dust magic compared to
the competition.

Things I can remember being absolutely _revolutionary_ when new:

\- Gmail

\- Google maps

\- Google docs

At the time, this quality and sophistication of engineering was simply unheard
of for web-based products.

Now they’re all slow, laggy, terrible resource hogs with ugly, non-intuitive
UI on top. Worse in almost every way.

They’ve clearly lost their edge.

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watwut
Google was always bad at UX and they are somehow getting worst.

~~~
zzzcpan
Being bad at something and swimming in cash only provides more opportunity to
do bad. Without competition nothing good is ever rewarded.

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nadim
yes!

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johnjohnsmith
"The usability of an OS is inversely proportional to the size of its control
panel." \--A college friend, circa 2000

Let's pick a particular UI/UX combo, the GUI: how have GUIs evolved over 3
decades, what has their complexity curve been like?

Microsoft:

MSDOS->WIN3->WIN3.1->WFW311->WinNT->Win95->Win2000->WinXP->Win7->Win8->Win10

Having used all of them, I'd say there was a huge drop in UI/UX from MSDOS to
Win3, but then steady improvement which peaked around Win2000, cratered, and
is crawling back.

The complexity ramped significantly: MSDOS6.22 was simple, solid (yes) and
predictable, and Win3 destroyed that for a loooong time. WinNT was a solid
rebuild, and merging it with Win3x led to Win2000, IMHO the peak. Now Win10
can't decide if it is a mobile OS or desktop OS, or an advertising platform,
and it feels that way when I try to use it. Tiles and old-time Dialogs are in
constant contention, the look in feel is at war with itself. I don't even know
how to help people with problems anymore because I've lost track of the Win10
control panel after WinXP when I stopped developing.

Microsoft has seen what Google is experiencing, but I do not think MS is out
of the woods yet. They appear to be trying to make it simpler...

Apple Mac

Classic MacOS up to v9 -> MacOSX -> all the mountains

I did zero Mac development until OSX, but I spent a lot of time using Adobe
products and eVision/Max audio tools. The controls remained largely
consistent: from one OS to the next for over 15 years the paradigms were the
same. That's the longest stretch of stability. OSX has been exploding with
features, specifically cloud based things that I don't want.

I think Apple is on the "oh shit this is a mess" peak. They too are trying to
figure out the macos+iOS strategy and it smells like convergence, but I bet
they have 5-10 more years in this feature-rich mess.

iOS

Do we all yearn for the simpler days of iOS when the control panel was more
compact and there were fewer confusing gestures? Yes. iOS is exploding in
complexity.

Android - I don't use it. /shrug/

Linux Desktops - I've been using MWM since 1992. The entire KDE / Gnome debate
was a giant clusterfuck IMHO. I've tried using fancy Linux desktops that were
supposed to be Windows-killers and its like wearing your shoes on the opposite
feet. I can't say this has hit peak complexity because it hasn't really gotten
attention from serious UI/UX talent.

Amiga, OS/2, NeXT ... I don't know enough about these, or they didn't last
long enough to experience the complexity curve.

TL;DR

I think it is safe to say that Microsoft has the most experience trying to
wrangle failed UI/UX experiments at scale. Mac & Google are just learning
this. I think it will be at least a decade before the latter two are able to
conceptually shrink the UX footprint of the O/S. My guess: everything
converges to tile-based mobile-like UIs on desktop, laptop and mobile. Mobile
OSes are just fine for desktops. IMO.

~~~
blattimwind
> Tiles and old-time Dialogs are in constant contention, the look in feel is
> at war with itself.

Many years ago MS made a book which pretty much said "Official UX guidelines"
on the cover; later this was available in MSDN. It was actually quite good,
though of course the OS never managed to adhere consistently. Useful advice
for developers. Now there is only a short guideline with a mixture of
different technologies and mostly focusing on tiny details, no big picture at
all.

The change in these guidelines is reminiscent of the change experienced in the
accompanying Windows releases.

(That being said, I'm baffled just how bad the default styling of Windows 10
looks. It reminds me of the flat styling available in 2000/XP [I don't mean
the standard 3D 95 look]. And I was taken aback that someone somehow somewhere
managed to actually make the Windows 10 start menu worse than the Windows 7
start menu, which was already laughably bad.)

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iamjk
Bring back inbox!

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sonnyblarney
Google is an Eng. driven company that excels at UI when it can be resolved to
'speed' and 'minimalism'. Speed is an easy thing for Eng. to understand you
don't even need to tell them to do it, they will start to optimize wether you
want it or not, like dogs to the bone. To this day 'delivered in 0.6 seconds'
appears in Search.

Minimalism is the poor man's design choice - which is good - it forces UI to
focus on the essential. This is why early Google interfaces were kind of ugly,
but so hyper utilitarian we did not care. But minimalism does not help if
you're facing an existentially tricky interface with a high degree of
irreducible complexity - i.e. there is simply too much information.

At this point you need good UI design which is founded upon a _culture_ of UI
design and has to be supported right from the top.

Nobody with hard power at Google seems to speak this language so is there
hope?

Design is also often a matter of opinion - and making some tough choices on
behalf of your users which can be hard. Apple does this in order to get rid of
a lot of clutter, you just don't see stuff that might be useful.

And there are some choice disasters ... if you're using Chrome and logged in,
and using YouTube - you might notice you are using '3 accounts' at the same
time - the top right corner will have your 'Chrome' id, and YouTube has
multiple Id's within an account, I've been using YT for years and have no idea
what that is.

... and in the new Gmail I've accidentally archived a load of emails because
of the 'magic buttons' that appear here and there floating over your inbox.

The list goes on of course.

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blcknight
Google is a steaming pile of dinosaur dung these days.

~~~
dang
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

~~~
blcknight
HN itself is unsubstantive.

~~~
dang
This the internet. It's hard to be anything other than shitty. It's all
relative, and if you have an account here we need you not to make it worse.

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satyenr
Look no further than stock Android! I know a lot of people like stock Android
for whatever reason, but I have always hated it. To me, it feels immature and
cartoonish. And let’s not even talk about all that wasted white space! I am
forever hoping Google will take some aesthetic cues from the like of MIUI.

I know it is depends on personal taste, but I absolutely cannot stand the
stock Android UI. Unfortunately, there are no other options if you care about
security, quick updates and devices supported for long. Also, since other UIs
(MIUI, EMUI etc) are not supported by Google, the apps seem very different
from the OS — i.e. there is no continuity.

