Dealing with nasty user feedback like this is one of the most painful parts of running a product. It still amazes me how many people refuse to consider the fact that there are humans on the other end of the computer. Instead, a lot of these arguments turn into accusatory conspiracy theory threads, as though things changing is a sign of some "secret plan". Is it that hard to believe that a product team is just trying their darndest to create the best product they can? Sometimes they'll get it right, and sometimes they won't, but constructive feedback always goes further than angry fist shaking. There's something about feedback for products on the internet that brings out extreme paranoia in people, and I don't get why that is.
Stop by the Facebook page for Battlefield some time. It's deplorable. I've kind of adjusted to the fact that there are trolls out there who just want to get a rise out of people, but a lot of the comments I see out in the wild these days are coming from "normal" people who just seem to have no idea that they're talking to another person.
Some of the people trying to foist changes like this off on their users should "consider the fact that there are humans on the other end of the computer."
You seriously think they don't? I refuse to believe that design decisions like this are made with absolutely zero feedback or human input. Google is an incredibly data-driven company. They always have been. Design changes can serve a multitude of purposes for a company. They can be trying to make a dated interface look better, make it easier to use for "average" users, or a combination of both. The thread was very informative in terms of explaining the rationale behind the design changes, and the fact that Google was so open about this leads me to believe that they do consider the human factor. With all due respect, your comment makes you sound exactly like the people I'm describing.
It's a self-serving simplification to make that criticism. There are lots of ways for a team to assess if users want to switch back to an old look beyond simply counting how many find that setting. In-house usability testing, user panels, customer feedback, etc. And they're all more objective than a forum thread.
Any product with millions of heavy users is going to have a subset that are upset by any change, no matter how positive it is. And if you make no changes, people complain that the product isn't being updated.
It's easy to be snarky and whiny. Sometimes it's hard to remember that not everyone may see the world the way you do.
Oh, no doubt; the plural of anecdote is not "data", and that's all a forum thread of complaints is.
And yet...while Google can fairly easily find out how people really view their changes, this does require them to want to assess that. And it's always been a little unclear why their app rewrite required a new UI. You'd think it might be easier to do that in two seperate passes...
A suspicious person might suspect that the app rewrite and the UI revamp were purposefully tied together in order to ward off poor customer feedback. But as you say, it's easy to be snarky and whiny. :)
Given how much of the app is tied into the UI, a full rewrite would seem to be exactly when you'd want to make any major UI changes. I've been in that spot a few times myself and the last thing you want to do is re-create the old UX on a new codebase before implementing the UX you'd "like to have".
In a perfect world you might even want to do the UX change first then rewrite the back end, but in reality if you did that you'd probably worry about losing support for the rewrite of the underlying plumbing once the new look has been deployed, since management often thinks of front-end refreshes as "delivery" of a new system.
What is interesting also is the total unanimity of user responses on the thread. You would think that some of the multitude of users who "love the new look" might have managed to find the thread and comment on it.
In my personal experience the probability of a satisfied customer seeking out a forum thread like this to provide positive feedback is vanishingly small. When things are working to your satisfaction, you mostly just carry on without thinking about them -- I actually quite like many aspects of the new look, and it hadn't occurred to me to do other than continue using it.
stop-script dialogs on GMaps + Twitter also (2x2ghz Atom, 850MHz ARM, webkit/firefox). its easier to ctrl-W than bother manually rewriting www to m on twitter and hoping it still works (with hashbang craziness often not).
ive just given up on even bothering reading anything on most of the internet, not worth fighting with unoptimized gobs of clientside code that ultimately just display a short bit of text and maybe an image in the end. even ipad V1 can barely handle twittter
Holy hell, the screenshot generating code in the "Report a problem" is exceedingly slow, even in Chrome. This didn't used to be the case less than a year ago. I wonder what got broken between then and now.
I know there are a lot of arguments for why the user owns a completely free interface that revolutionized electronic communication. I know that many of them will be stated below. I acknowledge that these arguments have weight and validity.
However...
This is a business decision. MaysonL stated that '...people trying to foist changes like this...should consider the fact that there are humans on the other end of the computer.'" Why exactly should they consider this? Has there been a vast migration? Are the people using the service paying them?
Has anyone noticed that Google is moving to enterprise platforms. More importantly, has anyone noticed that Google has an active branch pursuing RFPs an IDIQs in the federal space?
Google is looking for paying customers. This is how it goes. This is Hacker News for pete's sake. If you don't like GMail, make a product that works better and post it here. You'll probably get a lot of customers. (By which I mean freeloaders to whom you will have to provide massive memory and bandwidth)
>> Google is looking for paying customers. This is how it goes.
That's the way it should go. I am very glad to pay 50 bucks a year for my google apps.
I want to pay for it because I want the company that is storing and backing up my data to be profitable. I want them to have the mindset of having paying customers so they have to take care of their's customers data. I want them to focus on the product being good, ever evolving, and profitable. And gmail is exactly that.[1]
[1] Ok, I don't know if Gmail as product is profitable, but I do hope they go in that direction
All these design changes are done to increase revenue. When they talk about streamlining the experience, it's about giving ads a more prominent position across all their products and not just search.
There will always be people who hate redesigns. People hate change. At my company, every time we've made something that we know is better than what came before it, there are people who bitch. After a while you learn to ignore that, which can be dangerous in itself. If everyone listened to these people we'd all be using Windows 95 still.
