Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by jyrkesh » Tue, Dec 15, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

IggleSniggle wrote: post #120

jyrkesh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird for me to see all the love for Inbox in a thread about bloated webapps. I liked the Inbox UI a lot, but until it was spun down, I had an issue where each Inbox tab would eventually bloat up to 2-3 GBs. Considering I'd have 3 of those open, one for each of my Gmail accts, it quickly became something I couldn't use on my laptop (unless I refreshed each tab every couple hours).

I never noticed that. Inbox was what got me to inbox zero, quickly. I also used it almost exclusively on my phone, however.

Yeah, the phone app was crazy fast, and having moved from Mailbox, I loved the ability to easily archive from notifications.

Now that's Gmail standard, though

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

#312

Post by chenster » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

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system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.

Agree. When I commented how Material Design was so bad when it came out, many got offended. So I thought it must be a subjective personal thing. Now it's relief knowing I'm not the only one who think it's bad and full of UX anti-patterns. Flat design should be a thing of the past. It's unintutive e.g. hyperlink and button can be indistinguishable, no clear navigation UI. If any company should lead industry with a design framework, it should be Apple.

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

#313

Post by dafoex » Wed, Dec 16, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

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…

The need to incrementally change UI/UX is both a blessing and a curse, not only from a usability perspective but an aesthetic one, too. Since I use it a fair bit, I'll use Android as an example: I generally learn a new UI pretty fast, but there are still things from Holo and earlier that I miss. Also, Material Design that was mentioned in the post is a generally good thing in my opinion, but as they've tried to incorporate new widgets and things into it, its become more and more clunky to use and fugly to look at, and I personally blame incremental changes for MD 2 being shoehorned into MD 1.

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

#314

Post by anderspitman » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

tarboreus wrote: post #274

tacker2000 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

They also did this with Google Voice before they axed it. The original Gmail was such a tight app, I still quite miss it. Next thing they're going to make it harder to get your emails in and out and I'll be done with them.

I've been using gvoice as my primary phone number for 10 years. The UI has certainly had it's ups and downs, but I wouldn't say it's ever been "axed".

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

#315

Post by anderspitman » Thu, Dec 17, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #216

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…

Creative selection sounds like a perfect name for this phenomenon. GP's comment reminded me of working with genetic algorithms in school. Maintaining enough diversity and avoiding local maxima was a huge part of the process. Added that book to my reading list; thanks.