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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

#261

Post by rchaud »

anonygler wrote: post #22
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…

That's because the last decade of improvements at GSuite aren't for you. They're to satisfy made up requirements by Government and Enterprise IT departments, with the rest of the energy sucked out by European Regulations. Data location and retention policies, privacy, logging, data export, legal, etc etc.

What do any of those have to do with the worsening UI of their products? I don't recall seeing a button in Maps allowing me to download my browsing history.

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

#262

Post by rchaud »

bobyfyfy wrote: post #162
lr1970 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you mentioned has nothing to do with UI/UX.

I believe that is the point. Google isn't updating for UI/UX reasons.

That's clearly not true considering the navigation changes they've made to core products like Gmail and Maps.

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

#263

Post by tacker2000 »

harshalizee wrote: post #214
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…

>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.

Spot on.

As soon as i started seeing the “a new version of gmail is coming soon, click here to try it” banner, i knew that the end of my great gmail experience was nigh.

It’s funny because i NEVER even had the slightest doubt that the new UI would be shittier, and it turned out to be just like i expected it.

Gmail got big due to their extremely snappy ui and is now used by people who cant be arsed to migrate, like is the case with yahoo mail.

And every other google ui is getting worse every week.

To the googlers here, please show me a product where the UI has actually improved and is not just a whitespace inferno.

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

#264

Post by danso »

babesh wrote: post #140
danso wrote: post #4

This is one of the most content-vacant articles I've seen on HN lately. - "Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX" : provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage. - "What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?" : provides zero screenshots or even textual descript…

It may be mostly content vacant but I think the content was in the screenshots. The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just c…

Fair enough, there are 2 screenshots, one of GMail in message view, and one of a nested Google Analytics menu. But in the case of Google Analytics, the author spends most of the words complaining about a bugged/glitchy upgrade rollout. Which of course is worth complaining about, but shouldn't be the main example in a screed about company-wide failure – has there ever been, in the history of tech, a product upgrade+redesign that didn't glitch and anger long-time users?

But more to the point, GA is a specialized product for an audience of (relatively speaking) power users. What is the other analytics product that purports to deliver a comparable variety of metrics, in a more useful way? That's not a rhetorical question – I honestly want to know, and expected an article with this headline to have specific and tangible comparisons.

In the case of GMail – I honestly couldn't find how to get the specific view that the author sees. I'm still using the same GMail account that I opened in its launch month, which over the years I've tweaked to my liking – such as setting "Button labels" to "Text". So I checked a relatively new alt-Gmail account, and also my main Hotmail/Live account, and was surprised to see how similar the two interfaces are.

So what is the author's point of reference when he claims "Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch". I'm looking at my Hey account right now, and sure, it's different from my GMail interface, but I also use it 0.001% as much as I do GMail, and for a much smaller subset of communications. I sure as hell wouldn't tell people Hey is so much better than GMail and expect it to be self-evident to people, not without providing visual comparisons.

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

#265

Post by asciident »

danudey wrote: post #240
asciident wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is a nice option these days. Slack and VS Code are first-in-class applications, and while there's a slight performance hit compared to native, it's still a better experience than web (otherwise, people would have stuck with slack.com)

Counterpoint: Electron is a terrible option these days, and while I'd be okay with a "performance hit", it's actually UI lagginess that I can't deal with (and makes it a horrible frustration to deal with).

Isn't that just your opinion, versus the fact that it's the most popular IDE out there, so the plurality of programmers find that it's good enough?

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

#266

Post by uHuge »

zeku wrote: post #130
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 use chrome on android and it seems to work well for me. I don't understand what the issue is with that particular product. In fact I'm struggling to think of a google product I use that feels dated .

Home button? No simple copy from the URL field? Not in a share with menus unlike Firefox…

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

#267

Post by haecceity »

mgkimsal wrote: post #131
smsx wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you EOL a product, you no longer have to support it. Not the same case at all as making changes to a core product and then continuing to support it.

The point seemed to be that they don't want to make big changes because it's "disruptive". But... have no problem being disruptive to millions of end users.

Google doesn't want to be disruptive when it hurts Google. Disrupting users of a profitable product hurts Google. Disrupting users of an unprofitable product does not hurt Google. Google happy. Google kill unprofitable product.

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

#269

Post by vnlap »

nawgz wrote: post #170
kepler1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, this is a byproduct of too-sensitive people (and I have to admit liberal enablers) allowing feelings to become what you get judged by, or legitimized to take offense based on. And any offense is legitimate, because it's all relative. You cannot question anyone's taking offense. Any legitimate criticism of someone's work turns into a personal attack, or worse, "bullying". This is not a reasonable position to take…

> this is a byproduct of too-sensitive people allowing feelings to become what you get judged by You know, a word of advice - I've never heard someone who calls others "sensitive" or "snowflakes" also be capable of a good faith argument about the offensiveness / professionalism / etc of a topic.

Similarly, anyone using the phrase "good faith" these days is power hungry and acts in bad faith.

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

#270

Post by vendiddy »

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…

Agree here. Google could create a better UI that connects to their same backend and let users try I it out. Doesn't mean they have to break the existing UI.

It must have something to do with management but would be curious from an insider what is going on.

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