Google are crap at UI design.
It's all Metro, and then they do things like this.
Google Play Store Ratings Drop
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#22I might be an overly conservative old fart, but there was a time not so long ago, where your success wasn't depending on the UI decision (or any other decision) of a corporate overlord.
Back then, you made a product and it was immediately available for all the world to use. Yes, you had to spend some time/money/effort for promoting it and yes, the success might have been dependent on your ability to promote it.
But you didn't have to ask for permission to build it and there was no way to get screwed because the UI design of an entity you have no control over has changed slightly from one day to another.
I think it's a real shame that these days seem to be over more and more.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
* 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…
The worst thing for me is that they design for big screens and I have small one. Even when you pick up compact scheme.
The record was stats screen on blogger which shown me 3cm of information panel and the rest was taken by huge sticky !mostly empty! top and bottom rows.
Way to go, really.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
* 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…
You can actually hit CTRL+C when a Windows dialog is focused to copy the text of the window.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#25Earlier 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…
Agreed on Google Scholar. I actually prefer the interface of Microsoft Academic Search, but the coverage is just not good enough. Google Scholar indexes nearly everything, often within a day or two of it appearing on the internet. Whereas Microsoft has only managed to find about half my papers, and has somehow not managed to find any of them more recent than 2010. That's part of the difficulty in beating Google here, that before you can compete on user experience, you have to at least come close to matching their indexing.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#26When Google started to require users to use G+ and real names to post a review on the Play store, a number of reviews dropped significantly. The poor design decision described in the article may be a result of an effort to fix this dropped user engagement rate.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#27So 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…
Also, if the dip affects everyone equally, then its more like a rescaling (presumably on average these reviews are lower than before, I'd guess because no-one bothers to review a 2-3 star item, only if they love it or really hate it)
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#28That'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.
I wouldn't say so. With Chrome they practically redesigned web browsers. "Clutter" is what they were before.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#29I understand the frustration of the developers affected by this UI change, but I think that actively asking users to rate an app they have downloaded may lead to better ratings in a statistical sense.
User ratings greatly suffer from self selection bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias). Asking users who didn't initially rate an app do so as part of some other workflow might reduce that bias a little bit.
That said, I'm very distrustful of user ratings in general, both as a developer and as a consumer, because people often rate stuff based on criteria that don't concern me at all.
Re: Google Play Store Ratings Drop
#30Maybe it's related to this new awful app review trend? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7044833