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Google Play Store Ratings Drop
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#12That's a nice bit of legwork to show that poor UI design translates directly into erroneous user interactions. In conjunction with other recent Google stories ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107325 ) it's both cautionary, largely exculpatory of users (Google caused this problem), and speaks more than slightly to Google's hubris (I've seen plenty of poor UI from them over the past several years). An interestin…
Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their products is marred by UI inefficiencies, clutter, or inconsistency.
* They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all.*
Regardless of how you feel about how it turned out, they clearly have spent the past two years focusing on unifying design and UX across their products.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#13That's a nice bit of legwork to show that poor UI design translates directly into erroneous user interactions. In conjunction with other recent Google stories ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107325 ) it's both cautionary, largely exculpatory of users (Google caused this problem), and speaks more than slightly to Google's hubris (I've seen plenty of poor UI from them over the past several years). An interestin…
Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their products is marred by UI inefficiencies, clutter, or inconsistency.
Google Search pretty much nailed UI.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#14I see similar behaviour on my app.. Many 1 star ratings without any comments.. Initially I was convinced it must be competitor playing games.. But the trend continued.. Not sure how long Google will take to address this issue..
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their products is marred by UI inefficiencies, clutter, or inconsistency.
Google Search pretty much nailed UI.
It's rapidly in the process of un-nailing it.
Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation.
I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious.
Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-classes of search:
⚫ Google Books. Particularly the Ngram viewer. My frustrations with the company have reached a point that I hate to admit I love any of its products, but I love Google Books search and the Ngram viewer specifically. GBS makes serious amends by having one of the most spectacularly useless and annoying interfaces for actually reading online content. Contrast with the Internet Archive's book reader, which is a thing of joy, beauty, grace, and perfection: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/...
⚫ Google Scholar. I'm not aware of any other resource which has comparably deep coverage of research papers. Again, what the search interface giveth, the content interface taketh away, with the same online reading interface as Google Books, in the rare cases where journal publishers of recent content actually make full text available.
⚫ Date refinement. If DDG offered this my use of Google Search would fall by another 50-75%. Being able to search within specific bounded ranges of time is hugely useful.
⚫ Maps, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Mostly OpenStreetmap though "maps.google.com" is still tied to my muscle memory. Streetview remains tough to beat.
⚫ News, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Twitter's actually pretty good for breaking stuff, with search. Reddit isn't bad as a filter either. I've also got a few conventional news sources (NY Times, Guardian) on my rsstail feeds.
⚫ Financial data, though there are lots of alternatives. This is an area rife with perverse incentives, however, and for the data I'm typically interested in, research tools such as FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis), Wolfram+Alpha (despite its complete and utter lack of a definitive syntax), and upstarts such as Knoema and Gapminder are promising. I believe this period is actually showing signs of being a renaissance in advanced online data analysis and access tools.
Increasingly though, Google's my 2nd or 3rd tier search destination.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#16So here's the UI in question - http://blog.testfairy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/quick_s... - and apparently the large stars represent not a suggestion rating, but an app rating. So dismissing suggestion as a bad one you'd basically give a 1 star rating to an app. Or so the devs claim.
Coming from the iOS side, I just don't get it. How can you rate an app that you haven't downloaded? And then if you did download it, why is it being quick-suggested to you again?
Furthermore, if you did in fact download it, removed it and then reacted negatively to a suggestion to download it again - how's your low-star reaction is NOT really a rating for an app itself?
Also, if you look closely at the graphs, the "crashing" involves rating slide from 4.67 to 4.38 and from 4.79 to 4.74. It's still an unpleasant development for sure, but that's not a "crash" or a "drop", that's a dip. The matter appears to be completely blown out of its proportions.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Search pretty much nailed UI.
It's rapidly in the process of un-nailing it. Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation. I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious. Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-class…
Don't forget the best new feature: Google+ integration right in your search results!
Now you can see all the Google+ post blurbs right at the top of your results even if they aren't good ones! Also, Google+ notifications about random people adding you? That's right, it's right at the top of every Google search page with a nice red highlight so you don't miss it!
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google design sucks. They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all. Every one of their products is marred by UI inefficiencies, clutter, or inconsistency.
* They've never in the history of the company made a solid effort to nail UI and it's not part of their culture at all.* Regardless of how you feel about how it turned out, they clearly have spent the past two years focusing on unifying design and UX across their products.
One of the worst sins of UI is "unification".
It's helpful to have meaningfully consistent metaphors and themes across applications. For the UNIX / Linux commandline, that's processes and pipes, BSD and GNU argument flags, and the like.
There are various competing keyboard accelerator schemes: emacs, vi, Wordperfect keyboard templates, DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 9x/NT, Apple's Mac hotkeys, GNOME and KDE....
There are fundamental layout, font, and color palette schemes.
But one of the worst overall design features I see is taking a given scheme and applying it without regard to suitability across a wide range of applications with a wide range of use cases. For Google this results in the insanity of persistent browser elements occupying 25-30% of vertical screen real estate in Gmail, Groups, Book search, and other products. When the workaround is for me to either push my browser window half-height above my viewable monitor frame and drag down the bottom of the window, to be able to present my work front and center, or to open the elements inspector and delete elements from the DOM just to be able to see the relevant work, something's very, very wrong.
Microsoft of course was infected with similar idiocy with its modal, non-resizeable dialogs and wizards. Even GNOME, for all its UI/UX brain death, generally provides for resizable dialogs, and allows text to be copied from its error pop-ups (under Windows the only recourse was and to the best of my knowledge remains screenshotting the damned thing).
But ... Google and UI/UX? Not so much.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's rapidly in the process of un-nailing it. Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation. I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious. Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-class…
Don't forget the best new feature: Google+ integration right in your search results! Now you can see all the Google+ post blurbs right at the top of your results even if they aren't good ones! Also, Google+ notifications about random people adding you? That's right, it's right at the top of every Google search page with a nice red highlight so you don't miss it!
For numerous reasons, I've adopted a hit-and-run policy for Google services. I'll log in, do my deed (mostly pimping my content posted elsewhere), and log out.
Thankfully this greatly reduces the annoyance of G+ intrusion to all aspects of the Google empire.
I'm dreading the prospect of having to use Google tools in a work environment given the disease.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#20So here's the UI in question - http://blog.testfairy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/quick_s... - and apparently the large stars represent not a suggestion rating, but an app rating. So dismissing suggestion as a bad one you'd basically give a 1 star rating to an app. Or so the devs claim. Coming from the iOS side, I just don't get it. How can you rate an app that you haven't downloaded? And then if you did download i…
It's a suggestion to rate the shown app, to get better app recommendations.
It only shows apps you have downloaded.