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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

#131

Post by mgkimsal »

smsx wrote: post #103
mgkimsal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. They don't seem to have much of a problem EOL-ing products. THAT is often far more disruptive to large swathes of people. Perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions of people have been affected by various prod…

Once you EOL a product, you no longer have to support it. Not the same case at all as making changes to a core product and then continuing to support it.

The point seemed to be that they don't want to make big changes because it's "disruptive". But... have no problem being disruptive to millions of end users.

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

#132

Post by robertlagrant »

sitkack wrote: post #12
thrower123 wrote: post #9

The new version of Gmail is still horrible. Every day, I'll do things too fast, and it will pop alerts because some ajax request or promise hasn't resolved completely. I expected that things would get better eventually, but that has not been the case.

You are holding in wrong. If you bridge the gap between the two ajax requests with your thumb, the entities won't be properly deserialized when the second request is made.

And don't drop it! Gmail now has a glass back.

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

#133

Post by discordance »

bigtones wrote: post #68

The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture. The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really wan…

You’re right. Changes to the UX for a billion users is not easy. That’s why Googlers get paid the big bucks.

One thing they could do that would be universally good is making their apps light weight. The next billion users, as google refers to them, do not have the latest flagship devices.

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

#134

Post by Hasu »

discordance wrote: post #107
websterisk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t know if it would still work well these days, but when Google Reader left I genuinely felt less information-abled

I never used Google Reader, but did use other RSS, and I stopped years ago - not because RSS doesn't still work great, it does. But because so much of the content I used to consume with it is gone now. I used to follow a few dozen blogs that got updated regularly, and had RSS feeds. Now almost all those blogs are dead, migrated to Substack or Twitter, or post so infrequently that it's not worth a subscription.

A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.

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

#135

Post by ocdtrekkie »

asciident wrote: post #100
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…

Electron is a nice option these days. Slack and VS Code are first-in-class applications, and while there's a slight performance hit compared to native, it's still a better experience than web (otherwise, people would have stuck with slack.com)

I think Electron is bloated garbage, and it's a massive waste to shove a Chrome install into your chat client to be a chat client...

...But it's still better than Google telling the parent they have to install Chrome to install Google Chat.

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

#136

Post by doctor_eval »

sofixa wrote: post #81
mrweasel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major mistake Google also makes is assuming that everything is web, it's not. Google have world class engineers, they have the ability to develop infrastructure that scales globally, yet they apparently can't write desktop application. A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to down…

> 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…

Just like it’s a waste of time to develop 3 different chat platforms?

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

#137

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

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."

In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.

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

#139

Post by nxtbl »

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.

First I felt anger about the coming closure.

Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.

Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.

GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.

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

#140

Post by babesh »

danso wrote: post #4

This is one of the most content-vacant articles I've seen on HN lately. - "Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX" : provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage. - "What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?" : provides zero screenshots or even textual descript…

It may be mostly content vacant but I think the content was in the screenshots.

The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye.

The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.

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