Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.