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

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

#61

Post by egsmi » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:54 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…

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.

What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.

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

#62

Post by jyrkesh » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:54 PM UTC

Lutzb wrote: post #20

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…

When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the feature…

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).

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

#63

Post by fakedang » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

harha wrote: post #8

I think it seems more like Google doesn’t care about UX because they don’t prioritize/reward work on a product once it doesn’t grow in user numbers. They do care in the early stages when there’s an opportunity for quick growth (and promotions for those involved)

Doesn't explain the poor UX for its existing / inbuilt apps such as Google, Gmail, Drive, etc.

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

#64

Post by jyrkesh » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

kerng wrote: post #59

polishdude20 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

I cant believe I'm saying this but Outlook. I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most. Maybe for people tha…

Outlook for Desktop has its quirks, but it's still extremely usable and (mostly) performant, especially compared to any of the web-based mail clients out there.

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

#65

Post by exogeny » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done.

You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse.

Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail.

It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

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

#66

Post by mrweasel » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:57 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #31

anonygler wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The GDPR didn't require Gmail to become slow, or Google to provide multiple confusingly competing video call products.

GDPR also can't be implemented in the UI layer, because it would also apply to the IMAP/Gmail API, which doesn't suck... at least from a user perspective. Gmail is just fine in a real email client.

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

#67

Post by mordymoop » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

I remember a period of time when it seemed like Evernote was going surge past all the other cloud-document providers. They seemed to be doing everything right. Then they sputtered out. I still pay for Evernote because ... they're holding a huge amount of my old notes that I don't quite know how to get out. But I never add anything new to Evernote.

I could tell a similar story about Notion, though it is newer. While Evernote doesn't give you enough affordances, instead almost forcing you do use its internal search for everything, Notion gives you far too many affordances, leading to a tendency to create monstrous, unusable systems where information goes to die. Also, it is slow.

Google Docs, on the other hand, has been a consistent workhorse for both my personal and professional needs ever since its inception. Google Docs does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. In Google Drive, you move a Doc file around the way you would move a file around on your computer. Docs/Drive have never lost data due to a sync issue, or left me confused about where a file went. I like this. I want it to stay this way.

As for the UX on the Google Analytics ... yeah, the Facebook Ads interface is also completely opaque. I feel like this class of products is being optimized for something other than the feeling of transparency, and is instead cultivating particular workflows used by power users.

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

#68

Post by bigtones » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:58 PM UTC

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 want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead.

What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.

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

#69

Post by bengale » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #51

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…

I feel like there isn't even an option to give feedback to Google. I was trying to join a Google Meet (or is it Hangouts? or is it Hangouts Meet? Or is it Gmail meet?) event this morning. It somehow dialed out of my Gmail app (WTF?) instead of the Meet app, said it was "joining as" my personal account and I had no option to switch it to my work account, and I wasn't able to look at my e-mail during the meeting becaus…

I get the impression they don’t care if you enjoy using it, just that you are using it so they can continue to capture the data. They know most people aren’t going anywhere.

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

#70

Post by wcarron » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

polishdude20 wrote: post #52

Lutzb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the feature…

What sort of email client would you recommend instead?

I actually just began the process of migrating away from Google about two weeks ago. I chose FastMail for my new email provider. It's $5/mo, but honestly, I'm fine paying that, solely to get Google out of my emails.

I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive.

Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.