I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces."
The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX as much as they like, but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world. Every time Google has tried to make a major UX change -- look at Inbox, for example -- the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real. As a result, the UX tends to evolve in smaller steps, which (of course) results in the final result being more of a hodgepodge than you would get if you just started from scratch.
Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. These people know how to design good user experiences and care very much about the end result. But there is the reality of being boxed into design decisions that are difficult to undo without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. That is always an option, but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.
> ... without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago.
They don't seem to have much of a problem EOL-ing products. THAT is often far more disruptive to large swathes of people. Perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions of people have been affected by various product shutdowns, and there's never any rebound from that. Making UI changes can be rolled out to groups of folks with adjustments made on feedback, then further rolled out, or ... scrapped.
Once you EOL a product, you no longer have to support it. Not the same case at all as making changes to a core product and then continuing to support it.
The point seemed to be that they don't want to make big changes because it's "disruptive". But... have no problem being disruptive to millions of end users.
Google doesn't want to be disruptive when it hurts Google. Disrupting users of a profitable product hurts Google. Disrupting users of an unprofitable product does not hurt Google. Google happy. Google kill unprofitable product.
>Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers.
Google has great engineers/employees that their hiring process has naturally selected for a particular types of people. This doesn't necessarily mean good.
From what I've seen, Google engineers are amazing at solving hard system/foundational problems but absolutely terrible at making good products.
If you were to create a JIRA ticket asking to solve the traveling salesman problem or the like, you'll probably get a decent implementation by the end of the month before you can get a good well rounded product from Google.
Almost all Google products have regressed substantially since inception in just a few years. Gmail was snappy, quick and and had possibly the best UX in any mail client. Now it takes >20 secs on a broadband connection to give me a white-washed mess of a page with no real discerning advantage over the plain html version.
Google has the same problems and challenges you mentioned as any high scale, widely used large corp like Microsoft, Facebook, etc. has. The only difference is that the others go through periods of good-bad UX due to fast pivots, experimentation and luck.
What's the point of having these immensely talented employees if the culture/system can't actually leverage them to design something good?
The reality is that Google was a ground breaking company that rocketed to the moon, made a ton of money due to ads and now hoping to get lucky again by throwing things at a wall to see what sticks.
Google culture is now a highly risk-averse decision process system. It's the new IBM.
>Gmail was snappy, quick and and had possibly the best UX in any mail client. Now it takes >20 secs on a broadband connection to give me a white-washed mess of a page with no real discerning advantage over the plain html version.
Spot on.
As soon as i started seeing the “a new version of gmail is coming soon, click here to try it” banner, i knew that the end of my great gmail experience was nigh.
It’s funny because i NEVER even had the slightest doubt that the new UI would be shittier, and it turned out to be just like i expected it.
Gmail got big due to their extremely snappy ui and is now used by people who cant be arsed to migrate, like is the case with yahoo mail.
And every other google ui is getting worse every week.
To the googlers here, please show me a product where the UI has actually improved and is not just a whitespace inferno.
They also gave 1-2GB of storage back before Dropbox existed (predates Dropbox by 3 years) and other free webmails gave a some megabytes. It was a far superior mail-files-to-yourself platform than anything else on the market.
They also did this with Google Voice before they axed it. The original Gmail was such a tight app, I still quite miss it. Next thing they're going to make it harder to get your emails in and out and I'll be done with them.
I think while yes, UI changes does take a lot of care, I think it is a matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces."
If one of the richest companies on the planet can't pay to hire good designers, and just pay to buyout a whole ecosystem (ie what they did with AMP), then no one can.
Rather, I think your points aside, it's a matter of executive direction and attention. Google executives doesn't give a damn about good UI. They have all the money in the world, but won't spend it on proper improvements to UI and product interfaces.
You can argue until your face is blue that the people at Google are great, very talented, but unfortunately ... if the execs don't buy into it all these talented designers/engineers are just twiddling their thumbs and making design mocks that will never see the light of day.
Or as the saying goes: have their product cancelled once they make it a good product.
Do they even know it’s bad? Google has approximately no way to report issues in anything.
I assume they have telemetry for some things. Whenever I sign into Hangouts I have to report hundreds of porn spam chats I’ve been added to - they should be seeing that. Aren’t doing anything about it though.
They seem to be hooked up to a digital circular file. I've submitted probably ten of these and never gotten a follow up. Their forums where you can request help and note issues are infuriating, they have some low level person come in and annoy the asker with canned responses and irrelevances. Google is where customer service goes to die, then have its body exhumed and desecrated.
“making design mocks that will never see the light of day”
This seems accurate. I worked with UX teams on Cloud a lot. They _are_ brilliant. But every time the lifecycle seems to be:
1) They come out with fantastic mocks.
2) They run this by some internal committee and the design gets degraded.
3) Repeat step 2 10-20 times.
4) The final result is tiny incremental changes that look like the original UI was slightly re-shaped.
5) Rinse, repeat.
> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.
Sure you can. Empower your users instead of taking features away. Make it modular with the default modules being the old interface. Make reporting spam actually useful instead of feeling like it gets ignored. Make it easier to manage a list of _thousands_ of filters. Provide better IMAP integration instead of the half-implemented crap that it is right now. Hell, just make it so that I can encrypt my emails.
Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users. You don't have to break things to provide new features.
I've written software for over 20 years. C++ mostly, a lot of Python, some Xojo.
> With that many users, you are going to break something for someone. Probably for tens of millions of someones, at the minimum.
Maybe. I don't think it's a given though.
> At some point you will have to break something. Some of the new stuff will be incompatible with the old stuff. No one has a crystal ball.
Why? At no point does making something modular have to break something. Usually when something breaks during modularization it's because it was already broken and modularization simply made it need to get fixed.
Agree here. Google could create a better UI that connects to their same backend and let users try I it out. Doesn't mean they have to break the existing UI.
It must have something to do with management but would be curious from an insider what is going on.
> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.
What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.
Microsoft faced significant blowback for that ribbon change, and billions of dollars were spend on re-training hundreds of millions of office workers to do it. Because that change was in desktop software - users had the option of just sticking with the old version (which millions of users did) but you can't really do that with web applications.
Once you have worked with a product doing these kind of things, you'll understand you'll need to double or even triple the efforts to be able to support two branches of the same feature. Of course this doesn't apply to simple applications.
Confluence removed quite a few features from the new UI.
I don't know Circle CI but they probably have 2 orders of magnitude fewer users. Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.
> Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.
Well regardless, they still pulled off the harder technique.
That Atlassian Confluence model you gave had some serious issues, they they are going to turn off the option to keep the old UI as well, and it is an enormous strain on Engineering resources to keep two different versions of an entire application UI up to date.
One company that had done this a bit better was Salesforce with the old UI / Lightening UI switch.
Doesn’t that double the support surface? Bugs are still going to pop-up in the old interface, and so do you still tackle those or move engineer focus to the new interface? It seems weird to continue spending engineer time on an interface that is being phased out.
There's still threads on hacker news today bemoaning the ribbon UI and harking back to the good old days of drop down menus, and how great it was to be a power user back then. If you're after an example of a UI change with minimal blowback then I think this is a poor example!
> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.
And yet, Gmail keeps getting redesigned every so often to the point where it's hard to figure out how basic stuff works. This is a hard argument to buy.
*It took me a decent amount of time to figure out how to add users to cc/bcc. This sort of stuff, which was easy to do in the 90s shouldn't become harder every year.
Facebook is exactly in the same boat , but they have redesigned the user interface multiple times over the years. Even after so many years, Facebook still feels current.
Google has also redesigned their UIs several times over the same period of time.
I think a lot of big-product UI complaints come down to: different people want different things.
The more popular a product is, the more people the company has to satisfy. It’s just simple math that as a product grows, so does the chance that some vocal people will disagree with how it evolves.
I can’t think of a mass-market software product with a UI that everyone loves. You can find UI complaints about any of them—including Facebook and Google.
Facebook breaks things so often. I used to be quite active in Facebook marketplace as a seller and every week there will be a broken feature that does not get fixed until months after. Be it something small like missing link to photo gallery not working at all.
Sure, they have newer UI, but the stability of their features is poor.
That’s not the point. The point is that UI changes can be done to large audiences if you want to, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. I’d actually argue that the fact that FB’s “improvements” are actually user hostile is an even stronger case that user friendly UX improvements can definitely be done.
> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.
Of course there is, therre's always someone who will be upset. The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent, despite any research or the well paid "very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers."
> The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent
Where's your data on "unanimous dissent"? Also, there's often a silent majority of your products where people are totally happy with it and have zero complaints. You don't want to accidentally cater to the loud minority.
It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better". Knowing exactly what most of your users want is hard for everyone, even google.
Exactly. What happened, especially with Gmail, is that over time it consistently got worse and worse and worse. It went with small changes, but overall they all add up.
Now, we’re asking to make these changes go into a better direction. Surely we’re not asking for a massive overhaul in one big chunk, but many incremental changes, just like Google and any large organization for that matter has been doing for dozens of years.
With google maps at least, there’s been a decent number of sudden UI/UX changes that completely revamp the layout and features (often towards something less useful) — which indicates to me that there’s not that much of a struggle internally with the idea
"Being boxed in" - I think this is the crux of the point. It is being defensive with respect to the current position. Good design might need to consider the legacy, but rarely should be constrained by it. However in many situations an org can't really make these decisions and it takes a senior executive to own the decision that might cause near term blow back, but also enable escaping the local optima to a better one.
This is a very good point that once your software has a UI/UX and good adoption it's very painful to change it. Personally I despise when UI/UX changes to my daily software as my muscle memory is so honed in on how to do the work quickly. Frankly I don't care if it's optimal or not because it's completely suboptimal once the change is made and I have to spend the 2 weeks relearning it.
I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem. Maybe some day we can treat any UI with a long availability promise and continuously version it. Then the user can stick with their current version as long as it makes sense to them and if they want to upgrade they can do so voluntarily.
Except this ignores reality where Google has consistently made UX worse. Remember when Google search actually remembered your preferences? Or when you could set blocked domains in the account instead of only in their browser?
I use chrome on android and it seems to work well for me. I don't understand what the issue is with that particular product. In fact I'm struggling to think of a google product I use that feels dated.
IMO current OmniBar UI on Chrome Android is great improvement. Mostly we just search, sometimes copy the URL, rarely edit URL. So they made search as default and made an option to copy/edit URL.
I'm curious about this as well, I work at some feature factory and have been desensitized to people not really grasping iterative development of anything or just the words migrate, migration or gradually, but I find it hard to believe this would be the case at Google. Perhaps there's data we don't have that points out the impedance.
Google Maps stutters often on the latest iPhone Pro, which has the best mobile processor. It's not necessary to change the UI to make it work better. Is it an organizational difficulty in getting performance work prioritized? Or does it simply not matter since people don't have a better option available.
Maybe that was the case in mobile Chrome, which isn't that bad. Many other products have had bewildering UI changes just for the sake of UI changes or have even been completely replaced by other products that look entirely different. Look at the communications products from Google or the music products for recent examples.
Worse, all of these products share a cpetent-looking feedback system that is completely ignored. Recently, I've seen humans responding to poor reviews in the Play Store asking for the feedback to be submitted via the in-product feedback, but everybody knows that's a black hole. If anybody actually looked at the feedback submitted that way, Google would allocate an engineer to combining feedback from the Play Store into that system instead of responding on the Play Store with pretend interest.
Actually Google does this all the time. They just simply change the UX and features for products for seemingly no reason. e.g on Android, when I want to save a link to Pocket, I'd use the share button and it'd pop a list of all the apps I could share to. Now that has disappeared and has been replaced with a smaller list of apps(4-5) and the most recently used app to share or the most frequently used (pocket in either case) is not on this list. I have to scroll to the right and click on more apps.
Another example - on Android the pull down settings menu has now changed such that the list of apps is again restricted. I have to pull it twice to see the full list.
I've been holding onto Android for a while now but Google is trying their best to make me to iOS.
While you say "for seemingly no reason", somewhere there is a team happy that an A/B experiment has shown the change to move some metrics (which they care about and perhaps aids the team-member(s') goal(s) of being promoted) in the direction they desire. It's a thing of beauty when the metrics align with the interest of the user but this of course is secondary to the profit motive.
The need to incrementally change UI/UX is both a blessing and a curse, not only from a usability perspective but an aesthetic one, too. Since I use it a fair bit, I'll use Android as an example: I generally learn a new UI pretty fast, but there are still things from Holo and earlier that I miss. Also, Material Design that was mentioned in the post is a generally good thing in my opinion, but as they've tried to incorporate new widgets and things into it, its become more and more clunky to use and fugly to look at, and I personally blame incremental changes for MD 2 being shoehorned into MD 1.
I really appreciate this point, and I wonder if this is a flaw of the continuously updated model of cloud-based software. While it integrates with AGILE and bugs are (in theory) quickly fixed, there's much harder to make breaking changes. Contrast that to the versioned software model where Microsoft Word could make major changes like introducing the ribbon. I wonder if it's a good idea to do some sort of versioning in the cloud-based setting.
> Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX
Isn't it the other way round? For small start-ups, making disruptive changes is dangerous because losing important customers would kill the company whereas Google has the momentum to establish any change they want to make.
Start-ups still make disruptive changes because venture capital is eager to win big.
If you've read the research properly behind the Innovators Dilemma - I'd argue it's not such a case. CCs theory on disruption might be the most misused and overhyped stuff I've ever come to research. (did my MSc thesis on it, with support from a professor whose main research area was disruption...) - unless there are underlying new technological paradigm shifts underpinning those UX changes, but I doubt that.
This is a case of Google not seeing the cost/benefit equation being positive between changing the UX from it's current UXs to some other ones (within the same technological paradigm).
Sure, it might be a case of resource dependence and a lack of will to "start over". But that doesn't imply disruption as described by CC (at least not originally)
I see - just curious, in what way is it mostly misused and can you be specific about how I've misuse it? I'm still not convinced I've misused it but would like to know so I don't do it again
> but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world.
Then why google change (not minor) things and make them much worse than before?
I would believe this narrative... except for the god-awful indistinguishable new icons they just rolled out. Clearly the branding department runs the show over there.
This is one of the most content-vacant articles I've seen on HN lately.
- "Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX": provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage.
- "What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?": provides zero screenshots or even textual descriptions of whatever it is these competitors have that Google should just copy.
- "How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?" I guess the words "completely" and "obsoleted" have no meaning?
Today they added a weird "feature" in Google Search : when I hover on some results links, there is a blinking black line and the result description expands from 2 lines to 4 lines, sometimes with adding pictures. I trigger that effect involuntarily and this disturbing thing can't be disabled. Where this idea come from ? Google is more and more cluttered everywhere. I miss the Google search page from 2005. I don't have statistics but I always remember Google pages and UI being fast, simple and straightforward. Time passes and I feel my experience with Google UIs more convoluted.
Yes I'm getting pretty bored of these kinds of posts that offer no real ideas (this was just a rant) in order to drive traffic to their paid newsletter.
It may be mostly content vacant but I think the content was in the screenshots.
The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye.
The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.
Fair enough, there are 2 screenshots, one of GMail in message view, and one of a nested Google Analytics menu. But in the case of Google Analytics, the author spends most of the words complaining about a bugged/glitchy upgrade rollout. Which of course is worth complaining about, but shouldn't be the main example in a screed about company-wide failure – has there ever been, in the history of tech, a product upgrade+redesign that didn't glitch and anger long-time users?
But more to the point, GA is a specialized product for an audience of (relatively speaking) power users. What is the other analytics product that purports to deliver a comparable variety of metrics, in a more useful way? That's not a rhetorical question – I honestly want to know, and expected an article with this headline to have specific and tangible comparisons.
In the case of GMail – I honestly couldn't find how to get the specific view that the author sees. I'm still using the same GMail account that I opened in its launch month, which over the years I've tweaked to my liking – such as setting "Button labels" to "Text". So I checked a relatively new alt-Gmail account, and also my main Hotmail/Live account, and was surprised to see how similar the two interfaces are.
So what is the author's point of reference when he claims "Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch". I'm looking at my Hey account right now, and sure, it's different from my GMail interface, but I also use it 0.001% as much as I do GMail, and for a much smaller subset of communications. I sure as hell wouldn't tell people Hey is so much better than GMail and expect it to be self-evident to people, not without providing visual comparisons.
This is the local maxima problem. Any company that relies heavily on A/B testing suffers this problem. I know Netflix had/has this problem.
You try out a bunch of changes, and one of them makes a slight uptick in the metric you're tracking. So you implement that change and kill all the other experiments, instead of iterating on the other ideas to see if you can get them to do even better than the current winner.
Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. He'd just have it changed, and he happened to have good taste. Johnny Ive tried to do the same, but his taste was hit or miss, so now they have a conglomeration of taste and data made interfaces.
Google is 100% data made interfaces. From what I understand, their PMs have no leeway to go against the data. At least at most companies the PM can still make a decision against the data, and as long as they can justify it with user studies or something else they can move ahead.
Data can tell us a lot of things, but it can't tell us everything.
I like your description of this being a local maxima problem. The UX won't escape this maxima with incremental user testing. Users also push back on any changes to existing products' UI. Sometimes the best option is to create a new sibling product with a new UX.
> Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him.
In his book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs", author Ken Kocienda (an early engineer on Safari and the iPhone) claims Apple doesn't do any user testing to make data-driven product design decisions. Apple designers and engineers would create many prototypes and demo them up the VP reporting chain until the best prototypes got to Steve.
Creative selection sounds like a perfect name for this phenomenon. GP's comment reminded me of working with genetic algorithms in school. Maintaining enough diversity and avoiding local maxima was a huge part of the process. Added that book to my reading list; thanks.
Yeah, combine the basic challenge of the local maxima problem with the risk-averseness of a management chain whose reputation depends on running a division with a few popular services, and you end up with a small army trying to move the other mountains to your current mountain rather than creating, fostering, killing, and growing new bets.
As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets:
- Well I think it looks great.
- Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means)
- We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good.
Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.
The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."
> Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.
Not at Google, but what I saw was worse than that. It was "we need more data" over and over and, on each round, I could watch other people's riskier changes just fly by without a shred of evidence that they even did what they were claimed to (let alone that they were beneficial). "Need more data" is not always just inertia. It's often a way of defending territory or enforcing hierarchy. Being "data driven" only really works when it's done consistently, and abuses called out.
The problem with data driven is how do you get data without actually doing it. Sometimes you can prototype, but if they won't let you do anything you are stuck.
Then there is measurement. Even if you can prototype, you might be forced to collect the wrong data.
I think sometimes "need more data" has a similar connotation as "citation needed". It's a way to dismiss an idea you don't believe in without being fully dismissive. In other words, it can be a way of saying "I don't think it's obvious that your idea will float, but I'm willing to accept it if you can provide evidence for it".
Of course there's a risk for bias here, you'll be more inclined to trust a close team mate than someone with just as good arguments outside your team which can lead to unlucky territorial behavior, even when intentions are good. But at least it leaves an opening for challenge that "nah, I think it won't work and I own the code, sorry" does not.
Uggghh, this is a pet peeve of mine. Particularly when dealing with people that are not domain experts. Like why do I even exist, if not to provide a good data point for what the product you're developing for me should look like?
I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.
It's amazing to me that something as innocuous as, "Professional conduct includes at least an attempt at constructive criticism as opposed to venting" is now a heretical concept on this website.
Derision makes an unmistakable point. Is nothing worthy of derision? I say nothing rather than no one, because to deride a product's failings is not the same as belittling a person.
Let me add that Google has outsize power and influence, and the idea that we need to be nice to the corporate juggernaut is completely ridiculous.
We're not talking about 3rd party opinions here, we're talking about colleagues at the same institution being aggressive and destructive with professional designers.
Eye strain and inscrutable UI elements sound like concrete complaints. Whether they were phrased diplomatically, I'm not sure, and I'd concede it might be construed as venting depending on the delivery.
That being said, assuming it was brought up constructively, I see nothing wrong with the criticism except for the specific designers' refusal to consider it.
It would be great if it was brought up constructively. However, this thread appears to be about mocking the concept of psychological safety in the workplace.
I personally can't really see any evidence of mocking or any psychologically-unsafe ideas in any of the comments in this thread, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. You can criticize a product (design) without disparaging the person who created it, and I hope we all can take constructive criticism without making it personal.
Good UI design shouldn't be strictly for design's sake, so it can be frustrating when something is difficult to use because 'looking good' was prioritized over usability.
There's a quote I've read here that I like and think is appropriate: "Accessibility is for everybody."
Really, so this quote by ewmiller that I responded to:
> I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.
was not a direct attack on the notion that professional conduct should include some degree of psychological safety?
Or perhaps this post [0] that says:
> In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.
I'm a Google SRE. I'm not actually a big fan of the Gmail interface either (and it'd be better if they actually followed material design, imo).
But this spirit is fundamentally opposed to people in corporate environments doing good work. Blameless portmortems exist for a reason. Because otherwise, every systemic or personal failure devolves into a scapegoating competition designed to find and remove the most vulnerable member of the team. My criticism is directed specifically at folks suggesting that internally peers at my workplace should harass designers.
I feel like there isn't even an option to give feedback to Google.
I was trying to join a Google Meet (or is it Hangouts? or is it Hangouts Meet? Or is it Gmail meet?) event this morning. It somehow dialed out of my Gmail app (WTF?) instead of the Meet app, said it was "joining as" my personal account and I had no option to switch it to my work account, and I wasn't able to look at my e-mail during the meeting because the Gmail app was busy dealing with a call.
I don't even know where to begin about how awful of a UX this has become. I'd give them feedback but there isn't even an obvious option to do that.
Also, I truly hate the new UIs from Google where buttons jump around. The order of "Maps", "Images" tabs in search results jumps around depending on the search and that messes with my muscle memory. Buttons just randomly disappear and appear as you scroll up and down. Names of streets and restaurants randomly disappear in navigation mode. Some buttons get bigger and smaller as you scroll. What was the product manager smoking when they called for this BS? As a user I constantly feel like I can never use my phone, and I have no way to even relay this to them. Did they even care to A/B test this stuff and analyze how many times users were e.g. hitting the back button (or other metrics of user fumbling)?
I get the impression they don’t care if you enjoy using it, just that you are using it so they can continue to capture the data. They know most people aren’t going anywhere.
Well, if engagement is measured by time in the system, then a bad UI/UX can help that measure. If things move around inside an app frequently enough, I'm forced to spend more time using it because I on longer know how (Google Finance changed yet again a few weeks ago on me). If they hold an outsized share of the market + momentum from people having used their services for (now) 20+ years, then they can get away with this for a while.
This sounds cynical, but I wonder if this is actually the case to some extent. If you only look at engagement metrics, then those engagement metrics will be optimised, no matter how. Cobra effect and all that.
There’s an amusing issue with Google Opinion Rewards where it only supports payouts to PayPal (of all things), it doesn’t let you enter a PayPal account, instead it just assumes your Google account is your PayPal account and sends money there.
This means I can’t use it because PayPal somehow let someone else add my email to their account years ago and won’t unlink it.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins"
When Material Design was first launched to the public, I was astonished of just how bad some of it was – and how Google, with all its experts and resources, had managed to ignore so much basic HCI.
I wasn't able to recognize and distinguish different types of widgets from one another, and the design language broke with established principles. It wasn't evident how to interact with an element on the screen based on its visual qualities.
I assumed for weeks that the original Material Design launch video was parody. I'm a Brit, and sometimes American comedy just doesn't click with me.
I can still remember the feeling of surprise, followed by something more like horror, as I realised they were actually being serious, and that with their weight behind it, this mess of glaring flaws that numerous critics had picked up on from day one was likely to dominate a lot of UI work for the next several years. And sure enough, many of those flaws are still there today, hardly changed.
It’s been shocking to me how much Material Design has been worshipped in the design community and nobody has dared to pick out even the basic flaws in the design system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.
Here's a 2019 Google blog post about Google's user studies to redesign their Material Design text field. They ran three separate studies testing over 140 combinations of 7 text field characteristics with 600 participants. The end result is better but they basically just discovered that users couldn't identify text fields that had only subtle visual affordances (like a light gray underline instead of a black rectangle). The exercise reminded me of the Google designer story about testing "63 shades of blue links".
Agree. When I commented how Material Design was so bad when it came out, many got offended. So I thought it must be a subjective personal thing. Now it's relief knowing I'm not the only one who think it's bad and full of UX anti-patterns. Flat design should be a thing of the past. It's unintutive e.g. hyperlink and button can be indistinguishable, no clear navigation UI. If any company should lead industry with a design framework, it should be Apple.
I had to adjust the contrast on my monitors to see the boundaries of Google+ posts and UI elements, because light gray on lighter gray has been Google's favorite UI pattern for ages...
Had a similar experience, “data” is used where it seems useful to explain an already made decision. Criticism is hostile and un-googley when it doesn’t fit the narrative. At the end of the day for the sake of the promo it’s not worth arguing.
A company or individual who strives for excellence absolutely loves criticism as long as its constructive and not a personal attack. Criticism is great as it allows mistakes and issues get resolved. I feel like the statement:
>how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work
is absurd. No wonder google lags behind a large majority of tech companies in their design approach and UI. One of the reasons why Apple has skyrocketed past google in market cap(2.01T vs 1.19T) is they put the user first, make beautiful designs that are functional and hold their value well and have excellent customer service. Google has always held customer service and help as "beneath them", its in their DNA and I don't see that ever changing.
What I've always found odd is the lack of options across Google applications. It's one thing to play it safe, but another to deny basic modifications that are usually standard. Things as simple as changing color options are so often absent.
I think it's worth noting, just because it's kinda crazy: Gmail's desktop UI has and continues to support themes, including dark ones, for like... over a decade. It managed to survive all of their redesigns, while none of their apps had any dark modes at all.
Cheers to the one dude somewhere inside the labyrinth who managed to fight for that feature all these years...
It means they worry about losing their job when they're criticized. Like most things, it was supposed to mean actual physical danger, or at least real mental danger, but now it just means anything that threatens them in some way.
It's ironic, because that feedback could help make them better at their jobs and keep them from being fired. Instead, they force a situation where their termination is completely out of their control.
I wonder if this is an American phenomena and might be different in a place with a stronger social safety net?
Frankly, losing your job IS an actual physical danger and a real mental danger. No income, no insurance, have to play the interview game again... Time running out, savings getting gutted (too bad COBRA costs are so high). If you can't find work, well homelessness is a very real possibility (there goes years or decades of equity). There isn't a 'limit' to how far we let people fall, and that's a shame.
I would absolutely expect people in this environment to fight tooth-and-nail for their jobs, and that might result in this kind of resistance to suggestions. Gotta keep yourself and family healthy first and foremost.
One way is to reject all criticism and attack anyone who dares to try, hopefully preventing future criticism so that maybe, just maybe, your boss won't notice your incompetence.
Another is to accept the criticism, get better, and then not have to worry about your job because you do it well.
If someone isn't capable of actually doing their job, they can't really pick the second choice. In that case, it's in everyone else's best interest to expose the situation and stabilize the company, saving their own jobs.
Perhaps the designers in question are not understanding how much people dislike their work? Sounds like a difficult conversation needs to be had about accepting feedback, and making customers happy.
> Any legitimate criticism of someone's work turns into a personal attack, or worse, "bullying". This is not a reasonable position to take, and will come back to bite liberal people, either in work, government, or policy.
You are erroneously conflating liberal ideology (the western world except the USA) and sensitivity. In nordic countries, people are significantly less sensitive, and more liberal for example.
> this is a byproduct of too-sensitive people allowing feelings to become what you get judged by
You know, a word of advice - I've never heard someone who calls others "sensitive" or "snowflakes" also be capable of a good faith argument about the offensiveness / professionalism / etc of a topic.
This right here is the issue. Something like this happening is so unthinkable because you, presumably a good levelheaded kind coworker, can't even fathom why anyone would do this and you've been lucky enough to not have experienced it first hand. And because of your priors the only logical conclusion is that the victim must be lying or overreacting or too sensitive. It's a frustrating situation because at it's core it's totally logical but to me and others like me who've experienced these kinds of threats first-hand it's not outlandish and an uphill battle to get people to believe that this stuff really happens.
Now to be fair I'm not totally free of bias because I can't fathom why anyone would lie about something so serious and have experienced first hand the struggle of getting higher-ups to take you seriously.
Could you expand on: "Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work?" Your quote seems a little bit like a disingenuous paraphrasing of real issues, but I try not to dismiss things just because they're surprising to my world view.
I would be interested in seeing what kind of feedback (internal? external?) prompted this sort of response.
The translation of that is: "We're Google and we have literally billions of users, therefore we can't be wrong. Shut the fuck up and go back to your cubicle. Your opinion doesn't matter because I have more seniority than you, even though I work in an industry that largely tosses aside such ridiculous convention and had historically lauded and elevated risk takers and rule breakers."
In other words, Google has become thoroughly bureaucratic, which means it will inevitably stagnate and die... it'll just be a very slow death.
If you're a SWE and you say you don't like the new redesign of X for reasons Y and Z, you will be told various things, including "Do you have an art degree? Didn't think so", and "These are your coworkers. You need to be respectful of their hard work" no matter how respectfully you phrase your critique.
A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done.
You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse.
Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail.
It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
I'm ambivalent about the new layout they've introduced... I call it the 'mobilization' of the desktop web. I'm not overly fond of it, but I guess it eliminates a lot of the dead space that was present at high resolutions (1440p / 2160p).
Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade.
Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most changes made things worse.
Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search.
Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side.
Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load.
Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs.
It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.
When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone.
Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product.
It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.
Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.
Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.
GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.
Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.
I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription.
A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).
> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be
you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
> you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder).
At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree.
As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that.
Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption.
> At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering
Google Mail's spam filtering is many things, but I don't see why it's been particularly effective. Adaptive spam filtering was already being done before GMail came along, and unlike GMail's approach, the filters in other popular email clients didn't lurch so far towards avoiding false negatives that they all but broke normal email by having so many false positives.
I was a Google employee from 2005 to 2018. I HATED inbox, and I certainly wasn't alone. It divided users into two pieces, and the real issue was Google tried to force it on users rather than make it an option.
I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails.
I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive.
Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
Huh, I didn't know about that. I knew I could use my own domainl; but I'm not really motivated to do so. the fastmail domain suits me well enough. I always have the option to use my own domain later on, anyway.
My NYTimes sub goes to my gmail, and then it forwards to my fastmail (I rarely need to check my gmail).
I was unable to sign up for an Etsy account with Fastmail. They only acknowledge the majors. But I was able to sign up with gmail and then promptly change it to fastmail. Really sophisticated opsec on their part.
I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most.
Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
I just changed from a job that used GSuite to one that uses Office 365. I think Outlook is total garbage. The desktop client especially, and the website is barely an improvement. I've gotten used to it in the last month, but I still think the threading UX (my main gripe at this point) is really poor.
Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.
I don't know about the client, but make sure you are paying for the email SERVICE with your money. You want them to think of providing good service as how they make money, not scraping your email for advertising (or ??? - I can make up conspiracy theories...)
Not only is Drive's search poor, but Google's own search results have been getting notably worse. Somewhat recently, they rolled out a change where some keywords in your query will be left out to generate results for something unrelated. I've been having to wrap everything in quotes, add plus signs, and/or click on the "no, what I submitted really was what I wanted to search for, thanks" links on the results pages. I really hate to say it, but half of my searches are done on Bing now where I don't notice this kind of behavior taking place.
Also, if you want to talk about bad UX on Google products, I could write a book on frustrations I have with using Maps.
One major mistake Google also makes is assuming that everything is web, it's not. Google have world class engineers, they have the ability to develop infrastructure that scales globally, yet they apparently can't write desktop application.
A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to download Chat". Well that just weird, but okay, I can uninstall Chrome afterwards, no problem. Imagine my surprise when launching Chat also launched Chrome. I disregard this as being something Chat just do on first launch. Existing Chrome however also closed Chat.... Okay. Uninstall Chrome then, that should teach Chat to no fool around with Chrome. Now Chat doesn't work, because what Google doesn't tell you is that Chat is now a progressive web app. The icon is pretty though.
Chat can be a web app all it want, but it doesn't get to launch Chrome, I don't want that abomination running all day. The current fix is apparently to install via Home Brew, that downloads a stand-alone app. Google claims the new version is stand-alone, but if it was to launch Chrome it's not really stand-alone is it.
What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.
> What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.
Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?
> Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?
Facebook gave up on the one app and does native apps for the major phones for a reason: native is faster, ultimately more powerful and you have more control to fix bugs.
Electron is a nice option these days. Slack and VS Code are first-in-class applications, and while there's a slight performance hit compared to native, it's still a better experience than web (otherwise, people would have stuck with slack.com)
Fwiw, I use discord.com, slack.com, and teams.com. So at least some folks prefer chat in browser to Electron. I do this to preserve system resources, but because they somehow seem to work better for whatever reason when run from within the browser.
Counterpoint: Electron is a terrible option these days, and while I'd be okay with a "performance hit", it's actually UI lagginess that I can't deal with (and makes it a horrible frustration to deal with).
Is it really that expensive though? Again, take Chat, how many developers would that really require? My guess is three to five for each platform. One skilled Mac developer would be enough to be honest, but let's say five for redundancy and speed. I fairly sure Google have more than 15 developers on the PWA.
Plus given the similarities between APIs/languages, the same team of developers could likely handle iOS, iPadOS, and macOS without significantly more work than just iOS and iPadOS (assuming the developers are comfortable with all three platforms).
The majority of the underlying libraries wouldn't necessarily need to be changed; "only" the UI layer and some of the APIs (which is non-trivial, but doable).
In fairness, the "Can't write desktop applications" issue doesn't seem to be restricted to Google. The Microsoft Teams app for iOS is fine, nothing special but it works. The Microsoft Teams app for Microsoft Windows is just complete and utter garbage. It's laggy, it's missing features that the mobile clients have, and it's just kind of a mess all around.
In case anyone was wondering why Apple is going with the "iOS/iPadOS apps on the desktop" route, it's because this is so incredibly common; great, first-class mobile apps and nearly unusable, garbage Electron-based desktop apps.
Edit: Plus, in regards to Google, something about Chromebooks. A good desktop app on a Chromebook is just a web app that works well in Chrome. Why make a desktop app for what they seem to think is just an outdated computing metaphor using APIs they don't control?
There was a recent conversation between my aunt and I about her being able to video call my 86-year-old grandmother. Because we need video calls to just "pop up" for her, expecting her to accept an invite from her email (which she forgot exists...) or open a new tab for a new chat app (which she won't remember either...), isn't an option.
My aunt is pretty locked to Google platforms, she is the person who trains their platforms at her work... and you know what, the idea that she could "just use Skype" didn't even strike her mind:
It's already installed on my grandma's Windows PC, she already has a Microsoft account anyways, and it "just works", popping up a "[aunt] is calling] dialog when she gets a call. Skype worked great, and it's available on every platform.
It really starts to amaze me that Google doesn't understand the importance of that level of integration and simplicity considering their supposed market being "everyone". My aunt had been considering buying a Google Home/Nest/whatever it is today or an Android tablet, just to use one app to call my grandmother.
But my grandmother already has her PC open, and Skype "just works". It rings like a phone and it has a big green button to answer it.
That's because the last decade of improvements at GSuite aren't for you. They're to satisfy made up requirements by Government and Enterprise IT departments, with the rest of the energy sucked out by European Regulations. Data location and retention policies, privacy, logging, data export, legal, etc etc.
What do any of those have to do with the worsening UI of their products? I don't recall seeing a button in Maps allowing me to download my browsing history.
GDPR also can't be implemented in the UI layer, because it would also apply to the IMAP/Gmail API, which doesn't suck... at least from a user perspective. Gmail is just fine in a real email client.
Drive in general is a phenomenal mess (unless you upgrade and go all-in on team drives).
We inadvertently ended up with a weird heirarchy like A -> B -> C, where A was owned by user 1, B was owned by user 2, and C was owned by user 3, and everything was just shared with everyone else.
Then one day while cleaning up the account of a user who had left, I inadvertently un-shared "myself" (her account) from everything that everyone had shared with her.
This apparently resulted in her Drive account going through everything that had been shared with her and removing it from the directory it was in. In this case, Drive un-shared C to her, removing it from B, then un-shared B from her, removing it from A. Now all of those files still existed, and were still shared to everyone else, but there was no hierarchy to them anymore, at all.
This was a completely massive pain in the ass, meaning that one of our project managers had to recreate the entire directory structure, then go through every document that their knew of, search for it in their Drive, find what folder it was in, and then put it into the right place in the hierarchy.
Thankfully, they were the kind of person who had wanted to go through and reorganize for years, so aside from the sudden and completely unmanagable imposition on their time, they were pretty stoked to have a reason to deal with it. I, on the other hand, learned to just never touch Drive at all and migrate everyone to Team Drives instead.
Which it turns out you can't safely share to users outside of your organization. Fucking great. Thanks, Google.
I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too.
I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.
I think you just made my point for me: Nearly all of the ones I mentioned have both street view and 3D models of buildings. (I'd really discourage using MapQuest's web UI, mind you.)
If you had used anything but Google, you'd realize everyone else has these features too.
Bear in mind, Bing Maps powers a world-scale reproduction of the world for Flight Simulator... you thought that didn't have 3D models of buildings? It does have to fill in a lot of missing data, but it does start on a very good foundation.
Thanks for mentioning. I tried but there are some deficiencies.
- Apple Map : Better street view than Google. The scenes look more natural and having a higher point of view is much better but the point of interest is quite unfocused and their map app acts quite weirdly and very laggy under 3D and almost unusable. Funny their UI guideline always says not to block UI process but they can't do that themselves.
- Bing map : Map is very good. Point of interest is fairly placed but their satellite view is very rough in Japan.
Searching is weird. If I search for "California" I get taken to some location in Columbia with that name...
And not sure how they don't support Android? I get redirected to their search site when I visit maps.
- HERE map : I suppose this is US only? I checked a Japanese location and there's 1 big road in a major city and nothing else...
- MapQuest : Not really competing...
All in all, there are a few better things here and there for other maps, but nothing really beats the overall quality of Google maps at this point.
...Massive kudos for actually checking them out and comparing. You point out that you are outside the US and that's also potentially a big factor. All these companies are American and so their focus starts from there and moves out. It's totally believable to me they're not as good elsewhere!
HERE is based in Chicago, so it's possible I have a drastically better experience with this than average. I probably get their best as a local resident. As for who they are: They got bought up by a big auto conglomerate, you'll find their software on a lot of car nav systems. (EDIT: It's actually based in the Netherlands, but there's a pretty big Chicago team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies and https://www.builtinchicago.org/company/here-technologies)
I'd be pretty surprised if Bing Maps doesn't support Android, given that's Microsoft's recommended mobile platform. I haven't used an Android in years though.
I use Apple when I use Maps these days, but that's because it's already on my phone and it's been good enough every rare occasion I've needed it.
I usually think these "Google is the worst" posts are over the top, but I genuinely find Gmail's mobile interface bewildering. There are two three-dot/ellipsis icons when you read an email and after using mobile Gmail for years I have no idea which actions are in which. "Move to Inbox": upper icon. "Add star": lower icon. "Mark important": upper icon. "Mark unread": lower icon. I'm sure there's some explanation or at least mnemonic but I'm lost.
That's just a reflection of the data model, which is internally consistent but probably doesn't exist in the minds of all users.
The reason "move to [label]" is at the top of the screen is because that action affects the whole thread, not one message in the thread.
Star is attached to a message or a thread, so that should be in both menus, but in practice the mobile (iOS) app only lets you star a thread from the threadlist, while desktop web lets you star a thread while reading it. This is inconsistent.
Important is again in the thread's menu because it's an attribute of threads, not messages.
Read-ness is again an aspect of messages, not threads.
One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years.
If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my
migration to Fastmail.
Google Drive UI makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Even on non-mobile devices obvious actions and behaviours are made impossible. Want to open a new tab for every folder in Drive? Tough luck, you can't use middle click nor "Open in new tab" since it's some poorly made abomination without respect for the user. So you need to go back, but it's a large folder and will never load folders in one go, so you have to scroll down again and spend 5 seconds for the animations to end and load the next dozen elements. Just one of the many things personally annoying me, and it's not limited to it alone but all Google services, they are definitely among the worst I've ever had to deal with when it comes to usability.
On the other hand, maybe I'm so used to Drive that I've adapted to points like that, and trying to get used to Dropbox's web desktop UI (in an effort to de-Google) has been absolutely maddening.
Google Drive is so much more straightforward and I can reliably find parts of that app much easier than Dropbox's current UI.
I remember a period of time when it seemed like Evernote was going surge past all the other cloud-document providers. They seemed to be doing everything right. Then they sputtered out. I still pay for Evernote because ... they're holding a huge amount of my old notes that I don't quite know how to get out. But I never add anything new to Evernote.
I could tell a similar story about Notion, though it is newer. While Evernote doesn't give you enough affordances, instead almost forcing you do use its internal search for everything, Notion gives you far too many affordances, leading to a tendency to create monstrous, unusable systems where information goes to die. Also, it is slow.
Google Docs, on the other hand, has been a consistent workhorse for both my personal and professional needs ever since its inception. Google Docs does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. In Google Drive, you move a Doc file around the way you would move a file around on your computer. Docs/Drive have never lost data due to a sync issue, or left me confused about where a file went. I like this. I want it to stay this way.
As for the UX on the Google Analytics ... yeah, the Facebook Ads interface is also completely opaque. I feel like this class of products is being optimized for something other than the feeling of transparency, and is instead cultivating particular workflows used by power users.
That said, there is no question that things rot at google.
One thing other companies do but google does not - listen to customers just a bit.
My favorite is of course, google home can't get gsuite calendars, but I can setup alexa to get them fine (so whatever technical / secuirty argument there might be doesn't really hold).
This has been a top request for years? I wouldn't be surprised if it turns into a decade. Zero action.
This is just throughout things - they do the 90% solution, and WILL NOT touch the 10% you stub your toes on. If they just would tweak and fix a few things ANNUALLY they'd be very competitive.
The issue is that the biggest evangelists and the CEO's and CFO's and CTO's with paid google accounts (which at that level you want so you can have some confidence in service) can't get their calendars on their home devices. So it's not an issue of multiple accounts, but paid accounts not working.
How in the world is this so hard? I look forward to checking out the link, it needs to be more than multiple accounts, it needs to support PAID workspaces accounts.
I've just been around this again though with google family accounts, I couldn't accept the invite. And it hits you everywhere.
The new icons for their apps on Android are terribad. They are all the same colors. Now the photos app icon looks the same as the maps app icon, which causes me to confuse the two when I only give a quick glance. Gmail used to be red, now I have trouble finding it among all their other crap.
I group apps by functional area, so this actually hasn't affected me. But I can imagine if you group apps by brand for some reason then it'd be rather difficult to tell them apart!
It feels like Google has never really truly cared about UI. They seem to grok UX, but the aesthetics always drift towards the geekier side of user interface design.
This isn't to say they don't have lots of user interface designers, or that they don't get branding. It's that they lack a modern creative direction vision that connects those two functions.
Honestly, I feel that google just stopped caring about most of their consumer software several years ago.
Compare googles suite to office 365, and it just doesn't even compare, I use to hate microsoft, but as time has gone on, they have continued to modernize and update and add meaningful features.
Where googles UI continues to let their product rot on the vine, add and drop products at a rate that they can't be trusted to build a business workflow around.
and good luck getting support, the brilliant idea of having support options locked behind your account login, shows its weakness when your are locked out of an account and realize you have no meaningful way to get help.
Basically, I feel like google died, and what we have left is this trash heap.
One thing I have always thought is odd, is that a multinational company that has ~billions of users would have a single UI. At Google or Facebook scale, it would seems like having a more localized UI per region would make more sense. It isn't like they don't have the money to do this, and most of the service is behind an API/server-side, so having a different front-end better localized to, say, Arabic users, doesn't seem like it would place an undue burden on them.
I'd add that material UI is one of the worst things to come out of Google, and their implementation in GCP, Gmail etc. I absolutely hate it, and it looks cheap. Even Windows 10 interface looks better.
Even though Material UI is functional, there is something off about it. Something is weird about it, and I can't tell what. Maybe there's a word for it. It feels/looks cheap, like designed for the lowest common denominator device. Like... at least add a backdrop filter/blur to it, it gives a different feeling. The current flat design feels dead and soul less.
The only place where material UI is suitable is Google search. Not Gmail, not GCP and DEFINATELY NOT on stock android.
Someone explained it some years ago. It was about the lack of consistency in shadows and that conveying depth on a virtual sheet of paper does not feel natural
and you really have to thank Slashdot for that one. They really put the pressure on Google to stay lean. It was a backlash at the time against search engines that looked like these:
This is the real answer right here. Any product that doesn't see rapid user growth already has one foot in the graveyard of Killed By Google.
That website is a showcase of amazing ideas that needed time and nurture to come to fruition, but were executed like a poor earning Mafioso having a bad week.
You will have to compare them to their contemporaries, for instance moving from Hotmail and GMX to Gmail was great, not only for the free storage but also for it‘s simple UX.
Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know.
Tbh, It might just be me, but I am starting to feel that the vanity of Material Design is also starting to fade away. People are moving towards other options. In fact, with so many people in the design space doing great work I think users are starting to realise that the initial craze around the precise/scientific design that Google claimed Material Design to be is not really it. Things can be better than material design, and we are seeing it.
Recently with blueprintjs, notion, fluent design, and whatnot things I think have started to change for better. And then there is always apple doing its thing.
The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture.
The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead.
What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.
You’re right. Changes to the UX for a billion users is not easy. That’s why Googlers get paid the big bucks.
One thing they could do that would be universally good is making their apps light weight. The next billion users, as google refers to them, do not have the latest flagship devices.
They have done exactly that already. The lightweight versions of all those apps are called the "Go Editions" of all the G-Suite apps, and they're bundled with the Go edition of Android for phones.
> How can you run Gmail on an interface that’s tangibly worse than anything else out there?
Like what?
> How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?
What startups?
It's perfectly fine to critique Google UI/UX as "horrible", but if one going to do that, there needs to some examples of UI/UX which are excellent for those kinds of applications.
It's not free, but basically, after you use Fastmail to browse email, Gmail feels geriatric and broken. A loading bar to pull up your email account? Pages of emails? What on earth?
Gmail feels today like the web mail on my cPanel hosting felt like when I switched to Gmail.
Thanks, did not know about Fastmail, admittedly, I've not looked around for a long time. I've been using gmail since the early days.
Gmail has been "fine" for my needs, but now that I think about it, the filter and label dialogs have always been a pain in the ass. They've been more or less the same since the beginning, one would think that Google would freshen this stuff up-- but no. Moreover, gmail has become more aggressive about "categorizing" stuff on my behalf.
Will check it out. I think a key thing for me will be stability and the ability to transition my shit to another provider if needed.
Biggest thing you need to do if you want to be able to transition in the future: Get your own domain and point it at your mail provider. Then you don't have to change your address when you change providers.
The most fundamental problem at Google, of which bad UX/UI is one symptom, is that product management has no real power there. Engineering has all the power there, and basically does whatever it likes. It takes product management research as "input" for its decisions, but does not share power with product management.
Strong, competent product management balances user needs, marketplace conditions (competing and complementary products), and technological factors to create optimal products. What we see from the outside are products that are technologically strong, but suffer from lack of useful user perspective and market awareness.
Google will never create new (i.e. post search and AdWords) great products until it undergoes a complete cultural transformation toward a product management-focus.
No, poor product management from neglected product managers did that. You might not be very excited to design icons as your primary job, either, if you thought your job was to manage the entire product.
Do we know that's the case, that a product manager did this? Seems odd if they all accidentally designed very similar icons across the products. More likely this was a sweeping design centralisation change.
And do we know they were misled about their roles? You might think "manage" means "lead", but it doesn't.
The new version of Gmail is still horrible. Every day, I'll do things too fast, and it will pop alerts because some ajax request or promise hasn't resolved completely.
I expected that things would get better eventually, but that has not been the case.
You are holding in wrong. If you bridge the gap between the two ajax requests with your thumb, the entities won't be properly deserialized when the second request is made.
As someone working for a corporation that's in a lot of ways similar to Google, I'm no longer surprised that a big and successful company that's supposed to be full of smart people can be so incompetent.
I feel like I'm living on crazy island but I personally have no problem with Google's UI. Not just because I haven't used better, but I've also used much, much worse. It's functional enough.
And the thing is, Google UI/UX is not all that awful in many ways. Compared to some other corporate websites it looks and functions pretty well. But it could be so much better and which we would expect for a company of Google's caliber.
Having no way to do self-reflection to treat this problem is a bad sign that people inside Google are perhaps getting out of touch with what is really going out there. Or that there is enough inertia to block good design changes to pass through. Whatever it is, I would hope they would start stepping out of their own bubbles to actually understand what type of interfaces people like to use. Visit the factories with the machine consoles where there is only simple buttons and easy-to-understand menus for everything. And then try to retrace their path to the current interfaces and think why they have to be like what they are right now.
It's like relationships, you probably get attracted at first by the appearance of things but it is when that wears off you get the sense of what the other person really is. With UIs, that novelty can wear off pretty quick if it feels like pulling out teeth to use it (Google Analytics is one horror show).
It's not just horrible UI/UX. Google atleast used to be known for their aggressive focus on engineering performance & latency.
Anyone remembers when Google bought the Chromium team, Chrome was first launched, and it was lauded as the fastest and lightest browser? Fast forward today, and Chrome is the epitome of sluggishness, a godzilla of a browser. Gmail? Same – horrible, bloated, slow. Google G-Suite? Same. Android? Symbol of inefficiency, barely usable after throwing tens of gigs of RAM, CPU and huge batteries. Google Cloud Console? Piles of steaming slow foam.
It's almost as if, show me a product that Google does that is fast today, other than the bare minimum Google home page search box.
On one hand, they're facing erosion of product management. On the other hand, it's no longer an Engineering-driven company in the sense their engineering is not able to drive atleast that UI/UX to work performant.
Google.com however still looks and works almost exactly as it did 20 years ago. I don't know of any other site that has done that. I must give them credit for keeping the flame of simplicity lit and not giving into churning ads on the world's #1 Alexa ranked site.
Google's new icons are literally camouflaged. They have simple shapes, but the color changes break the shapes into indiscriminate masses of stuff.
That's exactly what animals and the military do to disguise themselves: They break their own shape and outline so it can't be snap-recognized as being distinct from the environment.
Google's new icons do exactly that, except that app icons should be snap-recognizable. Now they're a herd of zebras where you can't tell where one begins and another ends.
Someone ran a colorblindness filter on them. Predictably, they looked better because turning everything non-blue into yellow made the shapes more coherent.
This is not a high quality article. It’s more fodder for people to share their views in the comments but the article itself is not really HN caliber. Mostly just saying things suck without much specifics.
pretty ridiculous short sighted article. "Materialize or whatever". C'mon. If you don't know anything about it shut up. Material did huge things for usability and uniformity across the google landscape.
Over on Analytics, you're not reading stuff and clicking upgrade/migrate whatever and then complaining. Lame man. Yeah, it's complicated, maybe too much for casual users like yourself but it's also complicated for power users who are doing all sorts of things at different levels with it.
And this idea that EOL-ing products that everyone on here complains about every single week is all based on magical speculation that it affects 'large swathes of people... perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions'. You're in a bubble man, not that many ppl were affected by Reader shutdown. Inbox. Etc. The Inbox features made their way into Gmail as the one Googler describes features evolve in smaller steps. And everyone moved on from Reader but RSS never died as a tech anyways so geezus, follow some twitter streams or sign up to some newsletters and get with it.
Just some anecdotal fun, but I was looking into gsuite to separate work on a side-project from my main line of work.
The side project wasn’t ramped up enough to really need gsuite but... still, it felt like trying to use a two decades old operating system. Everything is scattered around in these oddly named apps, most I’ve never heard of and they don’t explain themselves. It was awful, I gave up after a couple weeks.
If these products all needed to compete for users, maybe google would get left behind. But many of the bad examples mentioned are from Docs and Gmail and things with large networks effects and huge frictional costs for users wishing to switch services, not even mentioning the services that are near monopolies and for which users don’t have many alternatives to.
The criticism of the Gmail desktop web interface seems insubstantial. There's a screenshot with some boxes drawn over it, but what's actually wrong with it?
Ask yourself also whether the desktop web interface of gmail is the most important one, or if its audience has been surpassed by that of the Android or iOS apps.
OK, I can kinda see that for the stuff at the top. However, most of the icons at the top correspond to a labeled item in the left sidebar, and each has a tooltip as well. I agree this isn't the best but I do not readily imagine a better way, either.
As for the stuff on the message level, left-pointing arrow has meant "reply" since the very first graphical MUA, the star is universal design language across Google properties including Chrome, and the three vertical dots for more actions is very common within and without Google.
One thing from the article I really wish they fix, is adding labels!
I get confused so much nowadays with the icons, and many apps no longer even have an option to expand and show the labels. And all the labels are mono-color too, no more colorful icons that help make them distinguishable.
I can't think of a single Google product, aside Inbox and Google Sheets, where I use it because I like to use it (well, not Inbox anymore). Everything else is either incumbent, utility or free.
I'm frustrating every time when I open a Map from Google Search. It opens weirdly feature-reduced version map and there's no link to open full Google Maps.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but as an outsider, it's hard to judge exactly why Google (and other major offenders like Facebook and Apple) have lost the plot in recent years.
I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards.
And notice that the goose is always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter.
This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world.
These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.
Google, stop showing me those annoying privacy boxes each time I open search or youtube in private mode. And don't tell me, you did that because of regulations, because you can easily provide a plugin (or browser option) to disable them all.
On YouTube I have to close two dialogs, before I can start watching videos. Very annoying.
There's only so much they can do without being called out for retaining state in "private mode." It's true that GDPR allows them to store a cookie to indicate that the user declined cookies, but private mode is something else.
What kills me is that when I hit the button to go fullscreen in YouTube, the first thing that happens after the transition to fullscreen is a carousel-like overlay of other "related" videos. Uh, OK, Google, why do you think I hit the fullscreen button, anyway? Because I want to watch this one.
The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX as much as they like, but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world. Every time Google has tried to make a major UX change -- look at Inbox, for example -- the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real. As a result, the UX tends to evolve in smaller steps, which (of course) results in the final result being more of a hodgepodge than you would get if you just started from scratch.
Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. These people know how to design good user experiences and care very much about the end result. But there is the reality of being boxed into design decisions that are difficult to undo without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. That is always an option, but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.