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Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

danielmiessler.com

141–150 of 315 posts

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

#141

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…

    If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins"
When Material Design was first launched to the public, I was astonished of just how bad some of it was – and how Google, with all its experts and resources, had managed to ignore so much basic HCI.

I wasn't able to recognize and distinguish different types of widgets from one another, and the design language broke with established principles. It wasn't evident how to interact with an element on the screen based on its visual qualities.

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

#142
post #14

I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces." The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion…

Makes sense.

OTOH why the complete revamp of Gmail's UI in 2018 or so instead of a gradual one?

Why start new chat apps from scratch every time?

Why kill Inbox?

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

#143
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails. I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar…

Note that FastMail allows you to add ~600 aliases to your account, choosing from a large list of domains.

I'd advise anyone to use their own domain, but those aliases can be a godsend.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This makes them feel unsafe at work." This is modern office equivalent of nuking the opponent in war.

Or like comparing a political opponent to Hitler?

I believe that's different because the shoe fits.

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

#145
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but as an outsider, it's hard to judge exactly why Google (and other major offenders like Facebook and Apple) have lost the plot in recent years.

I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards.

And notice that the goose is always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter.

This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world.

These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.

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

#146
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)

Fwiw, I use discord.com, slack.com, and teams.com. So at least some folks prefer chat in browser to Electron. I do this to preserve system resources, but because they somehow seem to work better for whatever reason when run from within the browser.

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

#147

Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most chang…

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…

There was a recent conversation between my aunt and I about her being able to video call my 86-year-old grandmother. Because we need video calls to just "pop up" for her, expecting her to accept an invite from her email (which she forgot exists...) or open a new tab for a new chat app (which she won't remember either...), isn't an option.

My aunt is pretty locked to Google platforms, she is the person who trains their platforms at her work... and you know what, the idea that she could "just use Skype" didn't even strike her mind:

It's already installed on my grandma's Windows PC, she already has a Microsoft account anyways, and it "just works", popping up a "[aunt] is calling] dialog when she gets a call. Skype worked great, and it's available on every platform.

It really starts to amaze me that Google doesn't understand the importance of that level of integration and simplicity considering their supposed market being "everyone". My aunt had been considering buying a Google Home/Nest/whatever it is today or an Android tablet, just to use one app to call my grandmother.

But my grandmother already has her PC open, and Skype "just works". It rings like a phone and it has a big green button to answer it.

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

#148
post #20

Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most chang…

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…

> it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be

you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.

Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.

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

#150
post #8

I think it seems more like Google doesn’t care about UX because they don’t prioritize/reward work on a product once it doesn’t grow in user numbers. They do care in the early stages when there’s an opportunity for quick growth (and promotions for those involved)

It's ok for them to think like machines and never become Apple.
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