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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

#211

Post by andromeduck »

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…

If they just kept inbox as Gmail beta it would have been so much better. Like have a core and a new app. Sunset the old UI a after a few years.

We should have a fast track and a slow and steady track.

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

#212

Post by cpeterso »

excitive wrote: post #168
eivarv wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s been shocking to me how much Material Design has been worshipped in the design community and nobody has dared to pick out even the basic flaws in the design system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.

Here's a 2019 Google blog post about Google's user studies to redesign their Material Design text field. They ran three separate studies testing over 140 combinations of 7 text field characteristics with 600 participants. The end result is better but they basically just discovered that users couldn't identify text fields that had only subtle visual affordances (like a light gray underline instead of a black rectangle). The exercise reminded me of the Google designer story about testing "63 shades of blue links".

https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...

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

#213

Post by eulers_secret »

wccrawford wrote: post #115
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." It means they worry about losing their job when they're criticized. Like most things, it was supposed to mean actual physical danger, or at least real mental danger, but now it just means anything that threatens them in some way. It's ironic, because that feedback could help make them better at their jobs and keep them from being fired. Instead, they force a situation where thei…

I wonder if this is an American phenomena and might be different in a place with a stronger social safety net?

Frankly, losing your job IS an actual physical danger and a real mental danger. No income, no insurance, have to play the interview game again... Time running out, savings getting gutted (too bad COBRA costs are so high). If you can't find work, well homelessness is a very real possibility (there goes years or decades of equity). There isn't a 'limit' to how far we let people fall, and that's a shame.

I would absolutely expect people in this environment to fight tooth-and-nail for their jobs, and that might result in this kind of resistance to suggestions. Gotta keep yourself and family healthy first and foremost.

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

#214

Post by harshalizee »

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…

>Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers.

Google has great engineers/employees that their hiring process has naturally selected for a particular types of people. This doesn't necessarily mean good. From what I've seen, Google engineers are amazing at solving hard system/foundational problems but absolutely terrible at making good products.

If you were to create a JIRA ticket asking to solve the traveling salesman problem or the like, you'll probably get a decent implementation by the end of the month before you can get a good well rounded product from Google.

Almost all Google products have regressed substantially since inception in just a few years. Gmail was snappy, quick and and had possibly the best UX in any mail client. Now it takes >20 secs on a broadband connection to give me a white-washed mess of a page with no real discerning advantage over the plain html version.

Google has the same problems and challenges you mentioned as any high scale, widely used large corp like Microsoft, Facebook, etc. has. The only difference is that the others go through periods of good-bad UX due to fast pivots, experimentation and luck.

What's the point of having these immensely talented employees if the culture/system can't actually leverage them to design something good?

The reality is that Google was a ground breaking company that rocketed to the moon, made a ton of money due to ads and now hoping to get lucky again by throwing things at a wall to see what sticks.

Google culture is now a highly risk-averse decision process system. It's the new IBM.

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

#215

Post by tekkk »

And the thing is, Google UI/UX is not all that awful in many ways. Compared to some other corporate websites it looks and functions pretty well. But it could be so much better and which we would expect for a company of Google's caliber.

Having no way to do self-reflection to treat this problem is a bad sign that people inside Google are perhaps getting out of touch with what is really going out there. Or that there is enough inertia to block good design changes to pass through. Whatever it is, I would hope they would start stepping out of their own bubbles to actually understand what type of interfaces people like to use. Visit the factories with the machine consoles where there is only simple buttons and easy-to-understand menus for everything. And then try to retrace their path to the current interfaces and think why they have to be like what they are right now.

It's like relationships, you probably get attracted at first by the appearance of things but it is when that wears off you get the sense of what the other person really is. With UIs, that novelty can wear off pretty quick if it feels like pulling out teeth to use it (Google Analytics is one horror show).

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

#216

Post by cpeterso »

jedberg wrote: post #189

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. Appl…

I like your description of this being a local maxima problem. The UX won't escape this maxima with incremental user testing. Users also push back on any changes to existing products' UI. Sometimes the best option is to create a new sibling product with a new UX.

> Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him.

In his book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs", author Ken Kocienda (an early engineer on Safari and the iPhone) claims Apple doesn't do any user testing to make data-driven product design decisions. Apple designers and engineers would create many prototypes and demo them up the VP reporting chain until the best prototypes got to Steve.

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

#217

Post by jakevoytko »

jedberg wrote: post #189

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. Appl…

Yeah, combine the basic challenge of the local maxima problem with the risk-averseness of a management chain whose reputation depends on running a division with a few popular services, and you end up with a small army trying to move the other mountains to your current mountain rather than creating, fostering, killing, and growing new bets.

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

#218

Post by mosfets »

robertlagrant wrote: post #118
bigtones wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Course you can. Just have an opt-in new UI. Confluence has done that really well, for example. CircleCI have been doing it. Sometimes I'd love to work at Google to really understand how it works. I'm sure change is hard, but I can't understand why from the outside.

Once you have worked with a product doing these kind of things, you'll understand you'll need to double or even triple the efforts to be able to support two branches of the same feature. Of course this doesn't apply to simple applications.

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

#219

Post by oblio »

inetknght wrote: post #32
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. Sure you can. Empower your users instead of taking features away. Make it modular with the default modules being the old interface. Make reporting spam actually useful instead of feeling like it gets ignored. Make it easier to manage a list of _thousands_ of filters. Provide better IMAP integration instead of…

> Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users. You don't have to break things to provide new features.

Do you work in software development?

1. With that many users, you are going to break something for someone. Probably for tens of millions of someones, at the minimum.

2. At some point you will have to break something. Some of the new stuff will be incompatible with the old stuff. No one has a crystal ball.

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

#220

Post by oblio »

robertlagrant wrote: post #118
bigtones wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Course you can. Just have an opt-in new UI. Confluence has done that really well, for example. CircleCI have been doing it. Sometimes I'd love to work at Google to really understand how it works. I'm sure change is hard, but I can't understand why from the outside.

Confluence removed quite a few features from the new UI.

I don't know Circle CI but they probably have 2 orders of magnitude fewer users. Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.

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