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Guys... honest question. What happened to settings menus? Why are we taking away configuration from users' hands?
The poweruser needs to die to accomplish this goal.
Guys... honest question. What happened to settings menus? Why are we taking away configuration from users' hands?
Configuration adds complexity and is a huge source of confusion for users. Google drive strikes me as something that should just work and be so simple that you do not have to configure it. There does not seem to be any genuine reason to make this change a setting because the main objection is just "I don't like it" rather than "it stops me from doing x" or "it makes x harder" It would be much less painful to just hav…
I see one of the comments on that page is:
« I just installed the new Google Drive desktop client (Win 10 pro) and the new virtual drive it creates triggers a non-compliance issue with ClearPass OnGuard that my employer requires (because the drive is not encrypted) and thus prevents me from connecting to their VPN. »
Maybe this OnGuard thing is being foolish, but that's no comfort to the user.
Guys... honest question. What happened to settings menus? Why are we taking away configuration from users' hands?
I guess companies are more interested in mainstream users than in technical users. The former are a larger group that seems easier to attract and retain, they mostly use defaults and don’t care that much about dark patterns. Google has been following this approach for years now, simplifying the UX in a way that both 1. makes the product easier to use and 2. in a way that benefits Google. Google has merged the url bar…
What if the emphasis of mainstream users is overstated? I find it more likely that an organization could be shaping features to coax its users into submission to make the org's life easier.
"Yes, mainstream users want this simplification. No, we can't share the data or methodology in which we surmised this. Yes, this makes our life vastly easier, but we want to excuse it by pinning it on mainstream users."
I've seen power apps (so by definition all the users are very technical and should not be patronized) that use the same reason to cut features instead of saying outright that it's too much to support. Maybe for a big org like Google it would be an admission of embarrassment.
Unlike Dropbox, where filenames are searchable by name on Everything, here that doesn't seem to happen -- at least the indexing takes more than 15 minutes with UI frozen.
An interesting tidbit: Google Filestream allows mounting on a folder. Google Drive for Desktop doesn't support it yet. Another interesting tidbit: the configuration settings in Google Drive for Desktop was migrated to a JSON setting stored on a registry setting (just in case you try following the settings of Google Drive Filestream).
Not an expert here, but I believe the folder sync is technically more difficult to get right and there’s likely lot of edge cases that give you lots of trouble.
I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer
Guys... honest question. What happened to settings menus? Why are we taking away configuration from users' hands?
Guys... honest question. What happened to settings menus? Why are we taking away configuration from users' hands?
I've come to accept that it's just a cost cutting measure for larger tech companies, why offer users an option when you don't need to? It costs extra to document, test and offer support for. I can't really think of any software from a major tech company that I use frequently and that's been updated to give me _more_ toggles to customize the app. It's always to take things away.
For example on a small company we had one user that needed RTL support, this ment we create backend code to store his perferences, front end code to add UI for it and testing the feature. We implemented because for a small company each user is important where big companies or projects(Firefox,GNOME will force this minorities to go elsewhere)
Guys... honest question. What happened to settings menus? Why are we taking away configuration from users' hands?
It's a dark pattern - don't let people use the software in unexpected ways that might take potential profit away from another service or future feature. If any use gives more value than was intended, that use will be curtailed, then properly monetized elsewhere, or simply (and more often than not) shut off.
If combinations of available settings reveal an actual bug, sometimes it's easier to take away the options than to fix the bug. But if it's simply a case that the software is doing things the developers don't want for any of the above reasons, they claim users are too incompetent to be trusted, and that they're removing the option for the good of the user.
It's a gross and vapid perverse incentive endemic to FAANG.
Good solutions exist for complexity and user configurations, like snapshots, reset to default, and so on. There's no excuse for mature software to lose configurability.