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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

#241

Post by bigtones »

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.

That Atlassian Confluence model you gave had some serious issues, they they are going to turn off the option to keep the old UI as well, and it is an enormous strain on Engineering resources to keep two different versions of an entire application UI up to date.

One company that had done this a bit better was Salesforce with the old UI / Lightening UI switch.

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

#242

Post by stickfigure »

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…

I would believe this narrative... except for the god-awful indistinguishable new icons they just rolled out. Clearly the branding department runs the show over there.

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

#243

Post by danudey »

mrweasel wrote: post #193
sofixa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs. Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop…

Is it really that expensive though? Again, take Chat, how many developers would that really require? My guess is three to five for each platform. One skilled Mac developer would be enough to be honest, but let's say five for redundancy and speed. I fairly sure Google have more than 15 developers on the PWA.

Plus given the similarities between APIs/languages, the same team of developers could likely handle iOS, iPadOS, and macOS without significantly more work than just iOS and iPadOS (assuming the developers are comfortable with all three platforms).

The majority of the underlying libraries wouldn't necessarily need to be changed; "only" the UI layer and some of the APIs (which is non-trivial, but doable).

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

#244

Post by bigtones »

discordance wrote: post #133
bigtones wrote: post #68

The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture. The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really wan…

You’re right. Changes to the UX for a billion users is not easy. That’s why Googlers get paid the big bucks. One thing they could do that would be universally good is making their apps light weight. The next billion users, as google refers to them, do not have the latest flagship devices.

They have done exactly that already. The lightweight versions of all those apps are called the "Go Editions" of all the G-Suite apps, and they're bundled with the Go edition of Android for phones.

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

#245

Post by alphakappa »

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.

And yet, Gmail keeps getting redesigned every so often to the point where it's hard to figure out how basic stuff works. This is a hard argument to buy.

*It took me a decent amount of time to figure out how to add users to cc/bcc. This sort of stuff, which was easy to do in the 90s shouldn't become harder every year.

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

#246

Post by danudey »

lock-free wrote: post #86
mattkevan wrote: post #5

Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most chang…

> Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search. For a search company, it's embarrassing how hard it is to search for things in their office suite.

Drive in general is a phenomenal mess (unless you upgrade and go all-in on team drives).

We inadvertently ended up with a weird heirarchy like A -> B -> C, where A was owned by user 1, B was owned by user 2, and C was owned by user 3, and everything was just shared with everyone else.

Then one day while cleaning up the account of a user who had left, I inadvertently un-shared "myself" (her account) from everything that everyone had shared with her.

This apparently resulted in her Drive account going through everything that had been shared with her and removing it from the directory it was in. In this case, Drive un-shared C to her, removing it from B, then un-shared B from her, removing it from A. Now all of those files still existed, and were still shared to everyone else, but there was no hierarchy to them anymore, at all.

This was a completely massive pain in the ass, meaning that one of our project managers had to recreate the entire directory structure, then go through every document that their knew of, search for it in their Drive, find what folder it was in, and then put it into the right place in the hierarchy.

Thankfully, they were the kind of person who had wanted to go through and reorganize for years, so aside from the sudden and completely unmanagable imposition on their time, they were pretty stoked to have a reason to deal with it. I, on the other hand, learned to just never touch Drive at all and migrate everyone to Team Drives instead.

Which it turns out you can't safely share to users outside of your organization. Fucking great. Thanks, Google.

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

#247

Post by oh_sigh »

fwip wrote: post #109
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…

Could you expand on: "Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work?" Your quote seems a little bit like a disingenuous paraphrasing of real issues, but I try not to dismiss things just because they're surprising to my world view. I would be interested in seeing what kind of feedback (internal? external?) prompted this sort of response.

If you're a SWE and you say you don't like the new redesign of X for reasons Y and Z, you will be told various things, including "Do you have an art degree? Didn't think so", and "These are your coworkers. You need to be respectful of their hard work" no matter how respectfully you phrase your critique.

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

#249

Post by mattkevan »

astrange wrote: post #117
websterisk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And any hands for Google Reader? I don't think any other tool has had that level of impact on my content consumption, prior or since. It was everything it needed to be and not anything more. RIP.

Do people know that other RSS readers exist and always have? I feel like they don’t. I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.

Reeder on Mac and iOS is good, been using it for years. You used to need a third party service like Feedly to sync across devices but the latest version has iCloud syncing which is pretty handy.

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

#250

Post by ocdtrekkie »

mekster wrote: post #235
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just made my point for me: Nearly all of the ones I mentioned have both street view and 3D models of buildings. (I'd really discourage using MapQuest's web UI, mind you.) If you had used anything but Google, you'd realize everyone else has these features too. Bear in mind, Bing Maps powers a world-scale reproduction of the world for Flight Simulator... you thought that didn't have 3D models of buildings?…

Thanks for mentioning. I tried but there are some deficiencies. - Apple Map : Better street view than Google. The scenes look more natural and having a higher point of view is much better but the point of interest is quite unfocused and their map app acts quite weirdly and very laggy under 3D and almost unusable. Funny their UI guideline always says not to block UI process but they can't do that themselves. - Bing ma…

...Massive kudos for actually checking them out and comparing. You point out that you are outside the US and that's also potentially a big factor. All these companies are American and so their focus starts from there and moves out. It's totally believable to me they're not as good elsewhere!

HERE is based in Chicago, so it's possible I have a drastically better experience with this than average. I probably get their best as a local resident. As for who they are: They got bought up by a big auto conglomerate, you'll find their software on a lot of car nav systems. (EDIT: It's actually based in the Netherlands, but there's a pretty big Chicago team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies and https://www.builtinchicago.org/company/here-technologies)

I'd be pretty surprised if Bing Maps doesn't support Android, given that's Microsoft's recommended mobile platform. I haven't used an Android in years though.

I use Apple when I use Maps these days, but that's because it's already on my phone and it's been good enough every rare occasion I've needed it.

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