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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

#281

Post by imbnwa »

andromeduck wrote: post #211
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.

I'm curious about this as well, I work at some feature factory and have been desensitized to people not really grasping iterative development of anything or just the words migrate, migration or gradually, but I find it hard to believe this would be the case at Google. Perhaps there's data we don't have that points out the impedance.

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

#282

Post by fomine3 »

uHuge wrote: post #266
zeku wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMO current OmniBar UI on Chrome Android is great improvement. Mostly we just search, sometimes copy the URL, rarely edit URL. So they made search as default and made an option to copy/edit URL.

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

#283

Post by fomine3 »

coldtea wrote: post #122
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.

Well, compared to native RSS readers Google Reader was crap. Why do people rememeber it fondly? Was it the fact that it was web based, or was it the only/first RSS reader people have used?

Web-based is big feature who read articles in original website rather than reader itself.

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

#285

Post by ocdtrekkie »

crispyambulance wrote: post #278
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not free, but basically, after you use Fastmail to browse email, Gmail feels geriatric and broken. A loading bar to pull up your email account? Pages of emails? What on earth? Gmail feels today like the web mail on my cPanel hosting felt like when I switched to Gmail.

Thanks, did not know about Fastmail, admittedly, I've not looked around for a long time. I've been using gmail since the early days. Gmail has been "fine" for my needs, but now that I think about it, the filter and label dialogs have always been a pain in the ass. They've been more or less the same since the beginning, one would think that Google would freshen this stuff up-- but no. Moreover, gmail has become more a…

Biggest thing you need to do if you want to be able to transition in the future: Get your own domain and point it at your mail provider. Then you don't have to change your address when you change providers.

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

#286

Post by coffeeling »

tacker2000 wrote: post #263
harshalizee wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Gmail got big due to their extremely snappy ui

They also gave 1-2GB of storage back before Dropbox existed (predates Dropbox by 3 years) and other free webmails gave a some megabytes. It was a far superior mail-files-to-yourself platform than anything else on the market.

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

#287

Post by mulmen »

denimnerd42 wrote: post #25
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…

This is a very good point that once your software has a UI/UX and good adoption it's very painful to change it. Personally I despise when UI/UX changes to my daily software as my muscle memory is so honed in on how to do the work quickly. Frankly I don't care if it's optimal or not because it's completely suboptimal once the change is made and I have to spend the 2 weeks relearning it. I'm not sure what the solution…

Except this ignores reality where Google has consistently made UX worse. Remember when Google search actually remembered your preferences? Or when you could set blocked domains in the account instead of only in their browser?

Or the complete overhauls of UIs?

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

#288

Post by sg47 »

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…

Actually Google does this all the time. They just simply change the UX and features for products for seemingly no reason. e.g on Android, when I want to save a link to Pocket, I'd use the share button and it'd pop a list of all the apps I could share to. Now that has disappeared and has been replaced with a smaller list of apps(4-5) and the most recently used app to share or the most frequently used (pocket in either case) is not on this list. I have to scroll to the right and click on more apps.

Another example - on Android the pull down settings menu has now changed such that the list of apps is again restricted. I have to pull it twice to see the full list.

I've been holding onto Android for a while now but Google is trying their best to make me to iOS.

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

#289

Post by ps747 »

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 really appreciate this point, and I wonder if this is a flaw of the continuously updated model of cloud-based software. While it integrates with AGILE and bugs are (in theory) quickly fixed, there's much harder to make breaking changes. Contrast that to the versioned software model where Microsoft Word could make major changes like introducing the ribbon. I wonder if it's a good idea to do some sort of versioning in the cloud-based setting.
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