Google Hangouts
hangouts.google.com
hangouts.google.com
There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).
There's the Android app which replaced GTalk, which also does (or used to do?) SMS, this new thing, the Google+ builtin UI, and a few others (what's the successor to the GTalk Windows app?).
I have been in Hangouts-on-air sessions were I had to intervene to send a proper link to a guest because the hosts could not figure it out.
Your question right here appears to be evidence of that: I don't even know which UI I should criticize for you as I'm not sure we are even talking about the same product.
In-videoconference, I think they are on-par or slightly ahead of Skype after the latter's update (it used to be much worse). Some things are better (warns you that you are muted if it hears you speaking while muted) and some are worse (in-videoconference text messages exist in a weird limbo that only lasts the duration of the Hangout, and have no history tracking).
In my opinion, it's the general "contact list"/"IM product" UI that is a bigger mess. My Hangouts app on Android keeps getting "unread" Hangout sessions from videoconference sessions I did on my computer. I sometimes get Hangout invites on my phone, sometimes on G+ and sometimes over e-mail (?). I think this aspect is what the OP was talking about when speaking about the lost opportunity. The general experience for a Hangouts-the-IM-product user is still very confusing.
1) Put https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/ on your web browser bookmark bar
2) Upon need, click on that, wait for URL to change, and then send resulting URL over $IM_SYSTEM_OF_CHOICE
Best UI I've found so far to what I think is a pretty stellar video/voice communication product. Now if they would only fix hardware acceleration on Mac...
This is just one example of a poor integration between two Google products, but those few little gaps in permissions and utility made it a product that didn't work for my needs at least.
Hangouts could be good, but it's awful at the moment. I wish they had at least kept the XMPP integration. I strongly suspect that Google would be more successful if they went back to a more open approach. If they had backed Diaspora rather than creating Google Plus, it would now be huge. Google Plus didn't even have a decent API. I have a lot of ideas on how to salvage it, but no one at Google has ever responded to my suggestions.
ps: I believe all your points on xmpp/diaspora are right, and that's how Google got popular, bringing good product (mail, maps) for free. Not trying to invent a whole G paradigm because Jobs said 'focus' in an Apple keynote.
>It appears as if you’re using an old or uncommon browser that doesn’t support common standards.
>To access Hangouts, upgrade to the latest version of any of the following browsers:
>Download Chrome >Download Firefox >Download Internet Explorer
Web standards, they said.
Google needs to remember why Gmail, Reader, etc ended up destroying the aforementioned products in terms of UX, and change the direction it's headed at.
As a result of a fairly recent job change, I have been forced into desktop IMAP clients again. I have to admit I have discovered a whole new level of appreciation for GMail.
Just the fact that it actually runs filters server-side and it has a (conceptually speaking) equivalent application for mobile devices trumps everything else. You can actually get it do to what you want.
The company I work for has a very heterogeneous systems landscape and I can say without much hesitation that GMail + Gcal's only serious alternative is Outlook. Everything else seems to me like a digital version of pen and paper.
Google does well when they stick to the Craig's List school of graphic design. If G+ looked like Craig's List and had a good API, it would have done much better. One of their mistakes is that they are trying to be innovative in an area that they have never been good at (design). It would be better to be very conservative with design and focus on being innovative in their strong areas (e.g., data).
Constructive feedback: get rid of the animations, stop cropping profile photos into circles, and go much lighter on the JavaScript, abandon Materials Design and model everything off the Google homepage: think "information not animation."
The chat window looks still elementary, though. I expected it to expand to fit the browser window. But it is still the tiny one that can be seen in Gmail and Google Plus, which is a bit annoying to use.
Namely, Joe-the-user can't see the hamburger menu at the top and looks for more tools where they are supposed to be: after the first few tools. So the UX guys at Google put an affordance there for him [0].
I've seen this quite a few times, especially for interactions where the search box is within the hamburger-driven overlay. Some sites/systems add a dummy, redundant search box on the main UI that just opens the hamburger menu and focuses on the newly-displayed search box.
That just looks as clunky and indecisive as a drawer with both a knob and a handle.
Gchat with what hangouts has for calls/voice/video would've basically been the win. Instead it constantly feels like this buggy/gimped browser app that maybe/maybe doesn't work.
1. Bundle this into an NW.js app and we've finally got a Hangouts desktop app at long last!
2. Those tiny chat windows are a usability disaster. Come on. Take a cue from messenger.com!
I'm often behind a slow public-wifi network and restricted on battery, so the amount of bandwidth and CPU used just to get me to text chat is actively a problem. I miss the XMPP days.
oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?
I was an XMPP enthusiast. Sadly, it never made the jump to mobile properly. I wish they had amended the standard to to add a session manager that would work well with mobile. Instead, last I check, everyone implemented their own hack. Google first, with Android GTalk. They used ProtoBufs [1]
Hey, did you know WhatsApp was based on XMPP? Yeah, good luck using that with an open client: their terms of service allows them to kick you off for using an unofficial client.
[1] I've come to think ProtoBufs would make a perfectly good transport for a hypothetical XMPP2. It's better packed, can be better framed, and as far as I've glanced allows the same extensibility as XML gave XMPP.
I ran my XMPP client on a UNIX server, to which I connect using mosh. As it happens, I tend to have this mosh connection open all the time to do actual work, so there's no additional overhead from running an XMPP client remotely.
(Still, there's no particular reason that a persistent though quiet TCP connection needs to drain battery any more than any approach; a TCP connection can stay open indefinitely without traffic if nothing in between the applications decides to time it out.
There might be complications on actual mobile platforms like phones, if your platform's push notification system does abstraction-crossing magic with the cell networks, such that you can shut down your data connection entirely until it needs to be woken up. But my use case is a laptop, so a constant IP connection is assumed.)
And besides, I was trying to focus the discussion specifically on mobile, which is the major platform today.
I'm really disappointed with the new babel that has emerged in the mobile chat world.
Um, TCP connections are totally silent when idle, save for application level heartbeats. And how would you implement a protocol with push notifications without TCP?
It's true that mobile push services exist to save power - they do this by maintaining only one heartbeat, for the most part. But it's not a huge win, and it could be added to XMPP. I don't see how protobufs help this situation at all.
In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to.
The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything else.
The most annoying problem with Hangouts is that I have to load the whole Gmail tab for answering a single message on my laptop. This tool is a lot faster. I zoomed to 125%, adblocked the bing background image & the now cropped giant greeting.
All I see when I visit is
500. That’s an error.
There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.
This is the same, rudimentary "interface" that has always worked in all the browsers. :/
Google really is a technology company, not a products company. They have some really very clever ideas and implement them with great mediocrity more often than they should. And even when they get something solid, you can never really tell for how long the product will last or if they'll start screwing with it.
For me, the only things that really come to mind as solid are maps and search. Google Now, great... if you don't have a Google Apps account. Inbox, great... if you don't need a bit slightly sophisticated formatting or image support. etc.
https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/g7qn5tqae6r63h7curf...
I've always wondered why it was so friggin' hard to start a hangout.