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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

#181

Post by caminocorner »

mdwelsh wrote: 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…

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.

Of course there is, therre's always someone who will be upset. The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent, despite any research or the well paid "very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers."

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

#182

Post by catwind7 »

mdwelsh wrote: 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…

This is a great answer - and this doesn't just affect products with hundreds of millions of users. It's a classic case of Innovators Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma).

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

#183

Post by CamperBob2 »

ihateg00gle wrote: post #45

Google, stop showing me those annoying privacy boxes each time I open search or youtube in private mode. And don't tell me, you did that because of regulations, because you can easily provide a plugin (or browser option) to disable them all. On YouTube I have to close two dialogs, before I can start watching videos. Very annoying.

There's only so much they can do without being called out for retaining state in "private mode." It's true that GDPR allows them to store a cookie to indicate that the user declined cookies, but private mode is something else.

What kills me is that when I hit the button to go fullscreen in YouTube, the first thing that happens after the transition to fullscreen is a carousel-like overlay of other "related" videos. Uh, OK, Google, why do you think I hit the fullscreen button, anyway? Because I want to watch this one.

The monkeys are running the zoo over there.

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

#184

Post by cnlp »

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.

Either they are advanced Machiavellians who adapted to the victim hierarchy as the appropriate power tool or Google has turned into a mental hospital.

Reading some Googlers on Twitter, it is hard to tell.

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

#185

Post by bluGill »

polishdude20 wrote: post #52
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…

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

I don't know about the client, but make sure you are paying for the email SERVICE with your money. You want them to think of providing good service as how they make money, not scraping your email for advertising (or ??? - I can make up conspiracy theories...)

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

#186

Post by deckard1 »

twblalock wrote: post #157
deckard1 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder). At the…

> truly effective spam filtering

I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption.

> At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.

Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.

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

#187

Post by stingraycharles »

fakedang wrote: post #54
me551ah wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is exactly in the same boat , but they have redesigned the user interface multiple times over the years. Even after so many years, Facebook still feels current.

Tbh I find the current FB UI to be very user hostile. The current layout seems unnatural. Granted, I don't use FB that often nowadays either.

That’s not the point. The point is that UI changes can be done to large audiences if you want to, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. I’d actually argue that the fact that FB’s “improvements” are actually user hostile is an even stronger case that user friendly UX improvements can definitely be done.

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

#188

Post by cbozeman »

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.

This comment is both simultaneously sad and hilarious.

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

#189

Post by jedberg »

This is the local maxima problem. Any company that relies heavily on A/B testing suffers this problem. I know Netflix had/has this problem.

You try out a bunch of changes, and one of them makes a slight uptick in the metric you're tracking. So you implement that change and kill all the other experiments, instead of iterating on the other ideas to see if you can get them to do even better than the current winner.

Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. He'd just have it changed, and he happened to have good taste. Johnny Ive tried to do the same, but his taste was hit or miss, so now they have a conglomeration of taste and data made interfaces.

Google is 100% data made interfaces. From what I understand, their PMs have no leeway to go against the data. At least at most companies the PM can still make a decision against the data, and as long as they can justify it with user studies or something else they can move ahead.

Data can tell us a lot of things, but it can't tell us everything.

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

#190

Post by catwind7 »

caminocorner wrote: post #181
mdwelsh wrote: 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…

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Of course there is, therre's always someone who will be upset. The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent, despite any research or the well paid "very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers."

> The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent

Where's your data on "unanimous dissent"? Also, there's often a silent majority of your products where people are totally happy with it and have zero complaints. You don't want to accidentally cater to the loud minority.

It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better". Knowing exactly what most of your users want is hard for everyone, even google.

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