Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

Post by marknutter » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #40

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." This is modern office equivalent of nuking the opponent in war.

Post by remus » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

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.

Post by lock-free » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

Post by Jtsummers » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

bengale wrote: post #69

dheera wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by lock-free » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #81

mrweasel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major mistake Google also makes is assuming that everything is web, it's not. Google have world class engineers, they have the ability to develop infrastructure that scales globally, yet they apparently can't write desktop application. A few days ago I tried to install Google Chat, for work. There's no download buttons to be found, you're just logged into Chat directly and is greeted by a "You need Chrome to down…

> What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs. Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop…