Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

danielmiessler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 315 posts

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

#171

Post by baconsunday »

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…

> - We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good.

My favorite is "We did a user study and they hated it, but a VP is pushing for it because Apple did it"

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

#172

Post by deckard1 »

ehvatum wrote: post #38
absolutelyrad wrote: post #16

I'd add that material UI is one of the worst things to come out of Google, and their implementation in GCP, Gmail etc. I absolutely hate it, and it looks cheap. Even Windows 10 interface looks better. Even though Material UI is functional, there is something off about it. Something is weird about it, and I can't tell what. Maybe there's a word for it. It feels/looks cheap, like designed for the lowest common denomina…

I think I can explain. The original google interface was a text box hanging in white space. Mind-blowing. Let's use this as our design language.

and you really have to thank Slashdot for that one. They really put the pressure on Google to stay lean. It was a backlash at the time against search engines that looked like these:

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/520631248826294272

This thread from 2001 is also an interesting read: https://slashdot.org/story/01/06/25/1316227/google-plans-an-...

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

#173

Post by ocdtrekkie »

crispyambulance wrote: post #116

> 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 ?

It's not free, but basically, after you use Fastmail to browse email, Gmail feels geriatric and broken. A loading bar to pull up your email account? Pages of emails? What on earth?

Gmail feels today like the web mail on my cPanel hosting felt like when I switched to Gmail.

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

#174

Post by bluGill »

notacoward wrote: post #105
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…

> Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence. Not at Google, but what I saw was worse than that. It was "we need more data" over and over and, on each round , I could watch other people's riskier changes just fly by without a shred of evidence that they even did what they were claimed to (let alone that they were beneficial). "Need more data" is not a…

The problem with data driven is how do you get data without actually doing it. Sometimes you can prototype, but if they won't let you do anything you are stuck.

Then there is measurement. Even if you can prototype, you might be forced to collect the wrong data.

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

#175

Post by Andrex »

0x_rs wrote: post #39

Google Drive UI makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Even on non-mobile devices obvious actions and behaviours are made impossible. Want to open a new tab for every folder in Drive? Tough luck, you can't use middle click nor "Open in new tab" since it's some poorly made abomination without respect for the user. So you need to go back, but it's a large folder and will never load folders in one go, so you have to scroll…

On the other hand, maybe I'm so used to Drive that I've adapted to points like that, and trying to get used to Dropbox's web desktop UI (in an effort to de-Google) has been absolutely maddening.

Google Drive is so much more straightforward and I can reliably find parts of that app much easier than Dropbox's current UI.

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

#176

Post by mekster »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #158
mekster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree there are many poor UI under Google's products, the map is still uncontested and still amazingly good including Google Earth.

Have you used other maps? I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too. I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.

Is there a reason to switch when they don't have street view and 3D modeling?

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

#177

Post by subsubzero »

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…

A company or individual who strives for excellence absolutely loves criticism as long as its constructive and not a personal attack. Criticism is great as it allows mistakes and issues get resolved. I feel like the statement:

>how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work

is absurd. No wonder google lags behind a large majority of tech companies in their design approach and UI. One of the reasons why Apple has skyrocketed past google in market cap(2.01T vs 1.19T) is they put the user first, make beautiful designs that are functional and hold their value well and have excellent customer service. Google has always held customer service and help as "beneath them", its in their DNA and I don't see that ever changing.

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

#178

Post by nxtbl »

Hasu wrote: post #134
discordance wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deca…

You can follow twitter, facebook, vkontakte, newsletters, youtube etc. with a RSS reader.

The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source.

https://www.inoreader.com/blog/

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

#179

Post by joejohnson »

If these products all needed to compete for users, maybe google would get left behind. But many of the bad examples mentioned are from Docs and Gmail and things with large networks effects and huge frictional costs for users wishing to switch services, not even mentioning the services that are near monopolies and for which users don’t have many alternatives to.

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

#180

Post by mirthflat83 »

exogeny wrote: post #65

A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done. You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just the…

Honestly, Facebook’s UX and UI are great.
Post reply on HN