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Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

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Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#21

Post by jrockway »

I've been using the logo-without-link UI for about two months, and I no longer even think about clicking the logo. It no longer registers as something that would make sense to do.

The designs of the individual applications provide stronger action buttons than a generic "reset" button would. This encourages users to be more efficient; instead of "returning home" after reading an email, you'll click "Archive" and have less clutter in your inbox. Similarly, Google+ provides many choices for what to do next. Maybe you want to look at your circles or photos instead of your stream. The new UI makes them all equally easy.

I feel like people use the logo as a "I'm bored, show me new stuff" button, but that is pointless because the Google apps automatically update as new stuff becomes available for you. Save yourself a useless click.

I wouldn't have made this change, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

(As for the + going missing in Chrome... I can't even begin to explain that one.)

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#22

Post by twelvechairs »

Its not just Google - most 'UI/UX experts' are actually really poor. Look at the mobile phone world for instance - it wasn't until the iphone that most people realised that every major company had overlooked the possibilities....

Company owners need not just to employ 'experts' but actually take an interest in these things themselves, which is rare. Otherwise you tend to end up with these kind of highly qualified fools.

I miss Google's early (engineer-led) minimalism...

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#24

Post by kibwen »

shingen wrote: post #15

He's spot on. The removal of the plus to create a new tab in Chrome is bad design, period. I hadn't noticed the lack of the logo link until someone else pointed it out. Why would anyone reduce ease of navigation, particularly from an object that is going to be there anyway? I use Gmail as my main email application, and have since they first launched it. They've started to annoy me with the interface changes. I think…

After the full roll-out of Gmail's new UI, which was seemingly obligatory, my UI reverted to the old interface within a week. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I opted-in to the new UI when it was still in beta, and then opted out after quickly becoming dissatisfied with it (I just really can't get over how laggy the mouseover animations are).

In any case, I've noticed that my Gmail querystring looks like this:

  ?ui=2&shva=1
Perhaps adding the ui=2 parameter to your own querystring will cause it to revert to the old interface?

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#25

Post by RollAHardSix »

CharlieA wrote: post #9
guynamedloren wrote: post #5

I'm most confused about Google's decision to remove the links from the logos. This is a convention engrained in the interwebs and I can't come up with a single reason why they would change it. Sure maybe inexperienced users wouldn't know the functionality exists, but when has that ever been a reason to remove a feature? I think there was a HN discussion about this recently, but I missed it. Anybody know why they made…

Purely speculation, but it seems like the only reason they'd do this is to free up the space for a future use case? While it will probably annoy/stump a few people for a second or two, ultimately people will just learn not to click on the logo. At that point, the Google logo could become... err... well they tried to turn it into an all-google-properties dropdown previously, so who knows, maybe they'll try again later…

"While it will probably annoy/stump a few people for a second or two, ultimately people will just learn not to click on the logo."

No trust me, you will try and click it everyday. My former college had, and still has, a link-less logo; that didn't stop anyone from trying to click it. It was actually a routine point of conversation in the beginning web classes about just how bad of a design flaw that was because the rest of the web adds a hyperlink to logo's.

If you have a company-esque logo, it should always, always, always take you to either the landing page; or your personal account page if in a logged-in state; depending on your personal needs.

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#26

Post by mattmanser »

citricsquid wrote: post #6

> First up is the 'new tab' chicklet in the Chrome tab bar. Somewhere around Chrome 16 the '+' disappeared from it, leaving a little ghost of a button that, to my mind, wouldn't be recognized for what it was by a user who hadn't already formed their mental model on earlier versions of Chrome. I'd noticed this and it was very irritating! I assumed it was a bug and for whatever reason the image was missing, not that th…

The weird thing for me was without the + the clickable area seemed much smaller and I felt it was fiddly.

But I happened to have my laptop and desktop open when the change happened and it's exactly the same size.

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#27

Post by ianox »

citricsquid wrote: post #6

> First up is the 'new tab' chicklet in the Chrome tab bar. Somewhere around Chrome 16 the '+' disappeared from it, leaving a little ghost of a button that, to my mind, wouldn't be recognized for what it was by a user who hadn't already formed their mental model on earlier versions of Chrome. I'd noticed this and it was very irritating! I assumed it was a bug and for whatever reason the image was missing, not that th…

The lack of the '+' was annoying to me at first. I don't seem to miss it anymore though, but then I do use the keyboard a lot for opening up new tabs.

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#28

Post by aevodor »

CharlieA wrote: post #4

Search results not carrying over to Google News when you click the black header tab is something that drove me crazy for a good week until I trained myself to use the left-side menu for switching between result types. It doesn't make sense, particularly when "News" is the ONLY tab which doesn't carry the search terms over. Try it with Images, YouTube and Maps; wonderful. I wouldn't necessarily expect convention to fo…

News is the only property in the list (with Google+) that has a useful homepage and no link back to the homepage from its search result pages (see https://www.google.com/search?tbm=nws&q=hello+world), which means it would very frustrating to carry queries for users who click this navigation links to go to Google News homepage. For all other products, either the homepage is useless (Images, Videos) or there's a link to the product homepage at the top of the page (in Maps, you remove results / go to Maps homepage via the maps' top-right menu).

NB: few months ago, results were carried for Docs, Gmail and Calendar. So I assume they measured the % of users who landed on the search results page for each products and directly clicked the Google logo to go the product homepage (as they expected). In the end, Google preferred to satisfy the X million users who didn't expect product A to show results for their previous query to the Y million others who did. Now, would you favor 5 very angry users or 1 million lightly confused users?

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#29

Post by rralian »

Honestly, google's UI for many things is just awful. I recently had to help an aunt who was trying to import contacts from her old gmail account into her new gmail account. It's a simple enough task if you're on our side of the digital divide, but it's impossible for anyone who isn't "good with computers." Of course the documentation for doing this was woefully out of date and unhelpful, so I couldn't just point her to that. Even the simple step of signing out of your gmail account is totally hidden and only available when you just try clicking on things (wich "we" do, but "they" don't). To get to your contacts you click on the red word "Gmail" (obvious, huh?), and then you have to click on "more", and then "export" (export what?). Absolutely none of this would be obvious to a non-savvy user. At the least they could provide up-to-date documentation or a more useful "help" feature. Gmail is great for me as a savvy user who employs all of the keyboard shortcuts, ala vim. But I can't blame the older generation for just giving up whenever they need to do anything slightly out of the ordinary, because we're just not designing/developing products that are usable to them.

Re: Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

#30

Post by iqster »

What I find really shocking is how the UX of the main google search page has deteriorated for me. It gives me all sorts of crap that doesn't make any sense ... and I don't even know how to complain since all the content is personalized to me (e.g. photographs). Google's search page used to be an Internet treasure ... for me, it is now another example of how the quest for revenue growth destroys beautiful products.
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