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Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

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Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#121

Post by eitland »

gweinberg wrote: post #64
zackbloom wrote: post #47

The person writing this is confusing their personal opinion for objective UX fact. It is commonly accepted that only highly organized users use features like tags. The vast majority of people simply don't. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this is hostile it's possible Chrome and Docs just have a wider user-base than this particular author.

I don't even think it's about organization, more aesthetic sensibilities. Why would anyone want to have special folder icons? "Because it looks nice" is the only possibility that occurs to me. I probably have over 1000 bookmarks myself, but I can't think of why I would want to "tag" a bookmark. Tags can be useful for finding new content, but if I bookmark a sit I probably know enough about it that I wouldn;t benefit…

> I probably have over 1000 bookmarks myself, but I can't think of why I would want to "tag" a bookmark.

I have 8000+ bookmarks.

https://pinboard.in/u:eitland/

I can mostly find anything I want within a few minutes. Oh, and I pay for archiving so there's a chance I can read it even if the link rots.

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#122

Post by eitland »

wruza wrote: post #106
marcinzm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's exactly because GMail supports it. Their data indicates that it's not a user friendly feature for the majority of users (ie: why labels can be nested since 2011) but it's grandfathered into GMail. GMail as I see it began with pure tags, spent a lot of effort trying to get people to use them and then ended up with quasi-folders.

It obviously is not user-friendly when you deprecate folders in favor of tags. That’s the thing which only a software developers mind could dream into reality. When they invent nested labels, it should scream “man that’s folder, folder, damned folder”. But it doesn’t. Everything is a tag, why not right? They already have: everything is a list, everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a process. Ho…

> Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?

Exactly.

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#123

Post by eitland »

gweinberg wrote: post #108
EForEndeavour wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of tags is that a single item can have multiple tags, so you're no longer constrained by having to decide on a specific folder hierarchy to organize them in. You can replace "folders" with tags entirely and still use tags as folders if you want, with the option of storing an item "in multiple folders" (give it multiple tags). Gmail has worked like this for a while: the inbox is just a filter which display…

I accomplish this by butting the same bookmark in multiple folders. In my file structure I do this with symlinks, but a bookmark is pretty much just a link anyway.A tag is pretty much the same as just a parallel folder, right?

A few times a year I update a bookmark.

Since my bookmarks use proper tags I just update it once.

If I kept multiple copies in multiple folders I'd have to update multiple bookmarks in multiple folders.

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#124

Post by darepublic »

zackbloom wrote: post #47

The person writing this is confusing their personal opinion for objective UX fact. It is commonly accepted that only highly organized users use features like tags. The vast majority of people simply don't. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this is hostile it's possible Chrome and Docs just have a wider user-base than this particular author.

Googles products are very confusing, not just the bookmarks but Google docs as well, or the workspace tools. I agree their UX leaves much to be desired, and if I had to bet 10 to 1 an aesthetic skin would be on the horizon quicker than any functional improvement

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#125

Post by benhurmarcel »

k_bx wrote: post #63

I always wondered why could you not add a note to someone else’s email in gmail to make it searchable. Would allow you to make gmail UI even simpler and in vein with article's claims too.

This is one of the features introduced by hey.com that I wish would get copied by others.

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#126

Post by EForEndeavour »

gweinberg wrote: post #108
EForEndeavour wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of tags is that a single item can have multiple tags, so you're no longer constrained by having to decide on a specific folder hierarchy to organize them in. You can replace "folders" with tags entirely and still use tags as folders if you want, with the option of storing an item "in multiple folders" (give it multiple tags). Gmail has worked like this for a while: the inbox is just a filter which display…

I accomplish this by butting the same bookmark in multiple folders. In my file structure I do this with symlinks, but a bookmark is pretty much just a link anyway.A tag is pretty much the same as just a parallel folder, right?

The whole point of being able to tag items in a hierarchical folder structure is to not have to manually find and update every duplicate copy of your bookmark when you want to change or delete it.

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#127

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

zackbloom wrote: post #47

The person writing this is confusing their personal opinion for objective UX fact. It is commonly accepted that only highly organized users use features like tags. The vast majority of people simply don't. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this is hostile it's possible Chrome and Docs just have a wider user-base than this particular author.

That majority user might never visit the bookmarks again once bookmarked and would likely use Google to search for the website again. So Google has incentive to not improve bookmarking, Though I'm not claiming that's the case.

I do agree with the other comments that if there are some features which solves some real problems[1] even the majority users would use it.

Bookmarks can help solve some new age problems too, I recently found phished website of our Income Tax site as a top result in Google[2] and those using bookmark to visit such sites which we use once a year could have prevented from getting phished.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/57-i-forget-my-web-bookmarks-qu... (Disclaimer: I run this)

[2] https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1409761416865746956

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#128

Post by topicseed »

wyre wrote: post #5
aplummer wrote: post #3

This is assuming malice when you could assume incompetence (to whatever slight degree this stuff is). Probably these things got put in a future release, or are in the backlog still. Well meaning product designers wanted them and can't have them or some other typical big-co reason a product gets little iteration.

Google Docs has existed for a 15 years and it’s UI has barely improved from what I remember.

Smart Canvas are an amazing update coming later this year. Took years in the making, but well-worth it.

Working with dozens of people through Docs and Sheets, I love their evergreen-ness. Sure, I wish there were more features but it's amazing to keep software simple, especially when it is used so widely.

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#129

Post by topicseed »

deregulateMed wrote: post #10
wyre wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Docs has existed for a 15 years and it’s UI has barely improved from what I remember.

Sheets has gone through massive improvements in features. It's no Excel, especially for bigger sheets or complex functions, but it's been a good way to provide my website users with a web spreadsheet. I'm reminded this every 4 years when I need to install Excel.

I love that =QUERY()....

Re: Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

#130

Post by topicseed »

antognini wrote: post #41

One thing to note is that the bookmark manager the article describes is Chrome's bookmark manager rather than Google Bookmarks, which, remarkably, is still around given Google's penchant for killing products that don't work out. It looks almost the same as when it launched in 2005. The "Gooooogle" links at the bottom, for example, still use the old serif logo. https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

Oh wow, thanks. I found what I'm going to spend my evening cleaning :)
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