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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

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Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#371

Post by geekster777 »

Former front-end dev of this UI here. This article makes the assumption that Google's primary goal is performance/page load. It's not. Feature parity and dev speed is. With a gigantic app like Cloud with hundreds of developers, there are massive technical hurdles surrounding things like independent releases, split bundles, and technical debt.

Google's business model for Cloud is b2b. The bottom line for getting b2b contracts normally comes down to requested features (among other things). Page load time doesn't factor as much comparatively, so these priorities do make sense. Not to say performance isn't on everyone's roadmap, but Google has and will continue to make strategic decisions that sacrifice performance over things like dev speed.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#373

Post by freediver »

geekster777 wrote: post #371

Former front-end dev of this UI here. This article makes the assumption that Google's primary goal is performance/page load. It's not. Feature parity and dev speed is. With a gigantic app like Cloud with hundreds of developers, there are massive technical hurdles surrounding things like independent releases, split bundles, and technical debt. Google's business model for Cloud is b2b. The bottom line for getting b2b c…

Google seems to fail to realize that cloud b2b starts with b2developer. A one single developer. Create an environment that developers love, and these developers will find ways to make b2b happen. Sell bottom up.

(and in case anyone from gcp is reading, not only the interface is atrociously slow - which makes me doubt the quality of engineering on the infrastructure side of things that I am supposed to be paying for - but the quota system is beyond terrible as well. Just the other day I wanted to experiment with youtube api to see what it can do, and it made me fill a quota increase form with at least two dozen questions almost asking what is my business plan with this - do you want users to use the api or not?)

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#374

Post by 0xy »

shadowgovt wrote: post #293
dullgiulio wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes little sense. AWS is even less uniform when it comes to tools, exactly because of its organic growth. This clearly has no impact on its success nor its features. Google does have a problem with management and the org-chart, but not the way you think.

AWS has significant first-mover advantage, but in chasing that advantage, Google sees providing a UI as a distinguishing feature to the AWS exeprience. But their focus is on spanning the feature-set, not making the resulting UI fast. And the feature set is incredibly broad.

GCP's interface is worse because it clearly prioritizes form over function. When I click a button in the AWS control panel, generally it works. When I click a button in the GCP control panel, there's a non-trivial chance it will result in an infinite loading screen or an ambiguous error.

I see it all over Google's products (with the exception of search). Gmail loads 50mb of assets these days, and is extremely sluggish. It shows you the search bar but if you try to type in it too soon it'll skip characters and start to chop. It's embarrassing. And I'm on an i9 with a gigabit connection. Imagine how horrific it is to a user in the third world.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#375

Post by themacguffinman »

freediver wrote: post #373
geekster777 wrote: post #371

Former front-end dev of this UI here. This article makes the assumption that Google's primary goal is performance/page load. It's not. Feature parity and dev speed is. With a gigantic app like Cloud with hundreds of developers, there are massive technical hurdles surrounding things like independent releases, split bundles, and technical debt. Google's business model for Cloud is b2b. The bottom line for getting b2b c…

Google seems to fail to realize that cloud b2b starts with b2developer. A one single developer. Create an environment that developers love, and these developers will find ways to make b2b happen. Sell bottom up. (and in case anyone from gcp is reading, not only the interface is atrociously slow - which makes me doubt the quality of engineering on the infrastructure side of things that I am supposed to be paying for -…

Even solo developers don't really choose a cloud platform based on the zippiness of the web UI. I've used Azure and briefly dabbled in AWS's web UIs, they're not better and are worse in some cases. Critical administration tasks are going to be wrapped and reused in CLI, the web UI is usually for ad-hoc stuff.

This is a pretty core staple of the b2b market: customers, even small ones, respond mostly to price & features that save a significant amount of time & money; Sorry but a sluggish web UI while annoying won't move the needle much on the bottom line.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#376

Post by graderjs »

symlinkk wrote: post #136
graderjs wrote: post #53

The medium is the message. In some domains, slow and clunky feels like gravitas and reliability. Enterprise software. Enterprise recruiting software. AWS has a pretty slow, and clunky dashboard. AdSense is clunky. A lot of the biggest companies' flagship apps have a very bland "bureaucratic" look and feel. You may find it hard to believe, but Zuck wanted facebook to look like a government database for a long time, wh…

This is a joke right? You really think they have someone spending all day writing while loops to slow down page load times?

This is definitely not a joke, but yours is, right. There's plenty of ways to end up with slow and clunky without "writing while loops" haha... This is how i really feel it is.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#377

Post by nojvek »

Google controls the chrome browser, angularjs and google cloud UI. With the smartest engineers, we still see a shitty user experience.

Just goes to say hiring engineers doesn’t solve problems. Focusing relentlessly on user experience, having performance and reliability as an org goal gets things done.

As you add more people, each of them has less autonomy on the customer experience.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#378

Post by cyral »

steren wrote: post #337
stingraycharles wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even then in the Google Cloud console I still feel that parts such as Stackdriver are, in fact, completely separate parts of the UI and not integrated into the bigger whole. Same for many other products. Which begs the question, what problem are they solving with this “unification but actually not” approach? Couldn’t they just bite the bullet and give up on the unification and be done with it? Phrased differently…

Stackdriver Monitoring is now fully merged into the Cloud Console.

For quite some time too.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#379

Post by ubercore »

zerocrates wrote: post #304
ubercore wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One pet peeve I have is getting to prime video. They own primevideo.com, but it just tells you to watch on Amazon. It's also the first result when you search (on google) for amazon prime video. There's no direct url to get it (afaik).

amazon.com/primevideo and amazon.com/video both go there. The situation with primevideo.com is strange, but it seems to have something to do with non-US territories?

Thanks, I had no idea!

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#380

Post by david-cako »

ubercow13 wrote: post #50
sorenjan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which large companies aren't bad at web frontend? UX seems to always be far down on the list or priorities for modern websites.

I find Github and Amazon's main site to be pretty reasonable in comparison.

github is great, both web and mobile (especially mobile). and their new homepage is great too.

target's item pages are really good right now. I love the information density and layout on their site, which to me is suggestive of thoughtful human-oriented design rather than amazon's (highly effective) a/b test shit shoveling.

amazon has "ship-it" UI standards and a lot of variance in page section order (could be a/b testing, or just discrete developer teams).

they have lots of really interesting ideas scattered around for how they can reach customers with unique contextual information, but I have a hard time with how dynamic the layout is and they also don't know how to make good hero pages. too many over-compressed image banners and image tables.

amazon and github both have crappy search which is kind of interesting to me. amazon sort basically doesn't work either, for price or for rating. not sure why.

/ecommerce rant lol

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