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Lessons from 14 years at Google

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Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#211

Post by Terr_ »

drnick1 wrote: post #151
websiteapi wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary

None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware. For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.

As somebody who already does this, I wouldn't say the Thunderbird's UX is the real motivation.

I do it for autonomy and avoiding lock-in, but Thunderbird has some frustrating inconsistencies particularly in its mishmash of searching and filtering.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#212

Post by hansmayer »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #164
hansmayer wrote: post #93

Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…

I think the UX issues you’re describing are less related to culture changes in companies and more just in the industry in general UX are designed by and for people who don’t really use computers. They use mobile devices and tablets It’s an industry wide phenomenon

You are onto something there, if you mean, the design roles being taken over by the people who are not techies - like the POs. But if you just refer to UX being designed for mobile devices - that is not an excuse for an even worse UX on the mobile. If anything I would have expected more effort put in there, given how many more issues the limited screen estate can cause...

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#214

Post by RobRivera »

Number 14 really speaks towards the subtle difference between being domineering in conversation and genuinely a sme in an area with little overlap in other people's domain knowledge. I feel like being extremely transparent in explaining the rationale and to a degree teaching really reinforces that boundary.

If you get to a point of silent resentment 'debt' in spite of efforts to empathise, consider perspective, and provide clarity, then you have a collaboration problem on the other end. How you choose to address that is dependent on your political capital, and sometimes you need to accept it.

Young me naively believed people were like rational automatons who would speak up when appropriate, not take thinga personal, and aspire to the true north that I aspired to as a colleague, and that is no baseline for a healthy collaboration.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#215

Post by lukeschaefer »

trescenzi wrote: post #13

> At scale, even your bugs have users. First place I worked right out of college had a big training seminar for new hires. One day we were told the story of how they’d improved load times from around 5min to 30seconds, this improvement was in the mid 90s. The negative responses from clients were instant. The load time improvements had destroyed their company culture. Instead of everyone coming into the office, turnin…

Absolutely - one of my favorite bug with users was an application we had made in which the loading of a filtered view was so slow, that results would come in one-at-a-time, such that clicking 'select all' would only select those ones. When this was removed, users complained until we added shift-clicking to select groups of items

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#216

Post by weslleyskah »

>Your job isn’t forever, but your network is.

I'm very suspicious of this working in the modern technological age. Even in university I'm feeling this: it is hard to create a bond with real friends, but extremely easy to regress to anonymity and become a loner.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#218

Post by hansmayer »

mike_hearn wrote: post #139
hansmayer wrote: post #93

Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…

> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users,…

Thanks for sharing your valuable insights. I am quite surprised to learn that talking to customers was frowned upon at Google (or your wider team at least). I find that the single most valuable addition to any project - complementary to actually building the product. I have a feeling a lot of the overall degradation of software quality has to do with a gradual creep in of non-technical people into development teams.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#219

Post by bitexploder »

hansmayer wrote: post #93

Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everythi…

There is a lot of nuance to their point. They are saying, in the long run, career wise, focusing on the actual user matters and makes your projects better.

Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. More that, if you follow the user what you are doing can be grounded and it makes your project way more likely to succeed. I would even argue that in many cases it bucks the trend. The author even pointed out, in essence there is a graveyard of internal projects that failed to last because they seemed cool but did nothing for the user.

Re: Lessons from 14 years at Google

#220

Post by kmoser »

stefan_ wrote: post #197
p1esk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost nobody else in engineering did this. What you described is the job of a product manager. Are there no PMs at Google?

PM is a fake job where the majority have long learned that they can simply (1) appease leadership and (2) push down on engineering to advance their career. You will notice this does not actually involve understanding or learning about products. It's why the GP got that confused reaction about reading user reports. Talk to someone outside big company who has no power? Why?

I've had the pleasant experience of having worked for PMs at several companies (not at Google) who were great at their jobs, and advocated for the devs. They also had no problem with devs talking directly with clients, and in fact they encouraged it since it was usually the fastest way to understand and solve a problem.
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