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Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

danielmiessler.com

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Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#111

Post by mpalmer »

KirinDave wrote: post #75
ewmiller wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This makes them feel unsafe at work. I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.

It's amazing to me that something as innocuous as, "Professional conduct includes at least an attempt at constructive criticism as opposed to venting" is now a heretical concept on this website.

Criticism: unacceptable unless totally devoid of emotion

Responding to criticism: bring your whole emotional self! guard your mental "safety" with your life!

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#112

Post by sliken »

websterisk wrote: post #57
ogjunkyard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).

And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.

I miss it, kinda annoyed by feedly, but not quite enough to find or host my own RSS aggregator.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#113

Post by tjlav5 »

random5634 wrote: post #13

The UI is fine. Seriously folks - get a grip. That said, there is no question that things rot at google. One thing other companies do but google does not - listen to customers just a bit. My favorite is of course, google home can't get gsuite calendars, but I can setup alexa to get them fine (so whatever technical / secuirty argument there might be doesn't really hold). This has been a top request for years? I wouldn…

This just popped up in android-police last week: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/07/google-assistant-ca...

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#114

Post by astrange »

dheera wrote: post #51
anonygler wrote: post #17

As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets: - Well I think it looks great. - Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means) - We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good. Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make…

I feel like there isn't even an option to give feedback to Google. I was trying to join a Google Meet (or is it Hangouts? or is it Hangouts Meet? Or is it Gmail meet?) event this morning. It somehow dialed out of my Gmail app (WTF?) instead of the Meet app, said it was "joining as" my personal account and I had no option to switch it to my work account, and I wasn't able to look at my e-mail during the meeting becaus…

There’s an amusing issue with Google Opinion Rewards where it only supports payouts to PayPal (of all things), it doesn’t let you enter a PayPal account, instead it just assumes your Google account is your PayPal account and sends money there.

This means I can’t use it because PayPal somehow let someone else add my email to their account years ago and won’t unlink it.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#115

Post by wccrawford »

anonygler wrote: post #17

As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets: - Well I think it looks great. - Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means) - We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good. Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make…

"This makes them feel unsafe at work."

It means they worry about losing their job when they're criticized. Like most things, it was supposed to mean actual physical danger, or at least real mental danger, but now it just means anything that threatens them in some way.

It's ironic, because that feedback could help make them better at their jobs and keep them from being fired. Instead, they force a situation where their termination is completely out of their control.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#116

Post by crispyambulance »

> How can you run Gmail on an interface that’s tangibly worse than anything else out there?

Like what?

> How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?

What startups?

It's perfectly fine to critique Google UI/UX as "horrible", but if one going to do that, there needs to some examples of UI/UX which are excellent for those kinds of applications.

So, who does noteworthy UI/UX ?

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#117

Post by astrange »

websterisk wrote: post #57
ogjunkyard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).

And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.

Do people know that other RSS readers exist and always have? I feel like they don’t.

I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#118

Post by robertlagrant »

bigtones wrote: post #79
egsmi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users. What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.

Microsoft faced significant blowback for that ribbon change, and billions of dollars were spend on re-training hundreds of millions of office workers to do it. Because that change was in desktop software - users had the option of just sticking with the old version (which millions of users did) but you can't really do that with web applications.

Course you can. Just have an opt-in new UI. Confluence has done that really well, for example. CircleCI have been doing it.

Sometimes I'd love to work at Google to really understand how it works. I'm sure change is hard, but I can't understand why from the outside.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#119

Post by sofixa »

lock-free wrote: post #90
sofixa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs. Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop…

> Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms? and yet the latest-and-greatest cross platform framework is supposed to be Flutter

It's mobile first, desktop and web versions are in alpha, and it's not supposed to replace generic web apps.

Re: Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

#120

Post by IggleSniggle »

jyrkesh wrote: post #62
Lutzb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feature…

Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).

I never noticed that. Inbox was what got me to inbox zero, quickly. I also used it almost exclusively on my phone, however.
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