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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

#71

Post by Meph504 »

Honestly, I feel that google just stopped caring about most of their consumer software several years ago.

Compare googles suite to office 365, and it just doesn't even compare, I use to hate microsoft, but as time has gone on, they have continued to modernize and update and add meaningful features.

Where googles UI continues to let their product rot on the vine, add and drop products at a rate that they can't be trusted to build a business workflow around.

and good luck getting support, the brilliant idea of having support options locked behind your account login, shows its weakness when your are locked out of an account and realize you have no meaningful way to get help.

Basically, I feel like google died, and what we have left is this trash heap.

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

#72

Post by mrweasel »

ouid wrote: post #50
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…

I would amend this to say that chat services have all been bad except for the first one, which was great.

Google Chat makes HipChat look like the pinnacle of chat applications, and HipChat wasn't that great.

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

#73

Post by corytheboyd »

Just some anecdotal fun, but I was looking into gsuite to separate work on a side-project from my main line of work.

The side project wasn’t ramped up enough to really need gsuite but... still, it felt like trying to use a two decades old operating system. Everything is scattered around in these oddly named apps, most I’ve never heard of and they don’t explain themselves. It was awful, I gave up after a couple weeks.

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

#74

Post by jeffbee »

The criticism of the Gmail desktop web interface seems insubstantial. There's a screenshot with some boxes drawn over it, but what's actually wrong with it?

Ask yourself also whether the desktop web interface of gmail is the most important one, or if its audience has been surpassed by that of the Android or iOS apps.

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

#75

Post by KirinDave »

ewmiller wrote: post #60
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…

> This makes them feel unsafe at work. I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.

It's amazing to me that something as innocuous as, "Professional conduct includes at least an attempt at constructive criticism as opposed to venting" is now a heretical concept on this website.

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

#76

Post by remus »

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…

> Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users.

When you have a billion users changing literally anything breaks things for some portion of your users.

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

#78

Post by metalliqaz »

The new icons for their apps on Android are terribad. They are all the same colors. Now the photos app icon looks the same as the maps app icon, which causes me to confuse the two when I only give a quick glance. Gmail used to be red, now I have trouble finding it among all their other crap.

WTF Google???

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

#79

Post by bigtones »

egsmi wrote: post #61
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.

Microsoft faced significant blowback for that ribbon change, and billions of dollars were spend on re-training hundreds of millions of office workers to do it. Because that change was in desktop software - users had the option of just sticking with the old version (which millions of users did) but you can't really do that with web applications.
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