And apparently something about HTML emails too.
And apparently something about HTML emails too.
Imagine this: you are Google. Raking in billions. PhD level scientists are hired to mop floors, and serve coffee to everyone. You hire top level designers, pay them $250k/year and tell them to improve Gmail.
And they do...Gmail gets better. You make more billions, hire more designers, pay them more and ... tell them to work on Gmail.
You now have 10 designers, "designing" GMail. Come end of year performance review all those highly paid, world class professionals will want to say "I did <x>, <y>, <z> and I deserve a raise". Nobody will want to say "Yeah, GMail is actually great so I left it alone and didin't muck with it, can I have my raise?". So, they go to town and re-design it every 6 months. Review comes and well they all can claim they have successfully re-designed, flattened, styles etc, added custom iframe, windows, etc.
This happens with software teams, that is why so much software is re-written, people don't get rewarded for maintaining as much as for creating. So they have to create, and when things get crowded, that means tearing down and then re-create.
- MS Office peaked around 2000 - Gmail 3 years ago? - GMaps 3 years ago? - I would argue Windows peaked somewhere between 2000 and XP
The same applies to managers. When an organization works well, they have the need to change things around just because.
A lot of it makes sense from the point of view of end of year reviews. They have to say they did "something" to justify pay raises and bonuses. The sad part is that a lot of times that busy works makes everything worse.
Sure, for power users, some things take two or three clicks which required one previously and I understand that's frustrating, but Office's old interface was a complete mess which got by on inertia - and there are still keyboard shortcuts and the customisable hotbar.
Google, could you please make Google Maps Pro, with consistent interface and advanced functions available all the time? I'll be a paying customer.
The ribbons manage to unify the drawbacks of both the button bar and the menu bar that you mentioned:
- it is composed of "rows of incomprehensible buttons" with no logical order (Where is the most-frequently-sought insert-column button in Excel? Hint: not in the "insert" ribbon tab, that would be too easy. Where is the function to create collapsible rows/columns? In the "Data" tab...)
- it has additional features hidden so well that nobody can find them without googling - Excel's most powerful features like creating named cell styles are now only reachable by clicking through several layers of unintuitive unlabeled mini-buttons tacked on as an afterthought. Yes, I have the muscle memory for remembering half a dozen triple-chord keyboard shortcuts like Alt-D-F-F, but nobody who didn't use Office 2002 will be able to use the new version at anything approaching full speed - that is exactly the opposite of UI discoverability.
New users should be given tutorials, online help or other kinds of training that successfully bring them up to speed. Those kinds of materials are then cleanly separated, and they get out of the way forever once the user is acquainted with the system.
But is that even a reasonable share of the market any more? I'm hardly a spring chicken and I was exposed to Office in elementary school. I would imagine that the proportion of people who've never used an office suite (and can't use Google to search for answers for how to do things) is fairly small at this point.
In my experience, adding the Ribbon was a huge step backwards in terms of usability, not because the Ribbon is inherently bad, but because it was a very big, very abrupt change from the File | Edit | View ... menu system that preceded it. I was working on an IT helpdesk at the time the Ribbon rolled out (with Office 2007), and the backlash from users who couldn't apply the same set of steps that had always worked for them to do things like adjust paragraph spacing was immense.
I feel like Microsoft was blinded by its focus groups. Perhaps the focus groups included people who weren't familiar with Office, or with computers at all, and that skewed the results enough to make it seem like the Ribbon was a good idea. But in practice, the cost of adopting the UI is not just the cost of learning the new UI, but also the cost of forgetting the UI that preceded it. The Ribbon might be great if you're starting from scratch with a new UI, but the existing Office 2000 UI was so entrenched, the cost of forgetting was huge.
Uh, Windows 2000 was good on supported hardware but had really poor support for typical consumer PCs. XP was a security nightmare, although XP SP2 did improve things. Hardly a "peak". Newer versions of Windows, with malware protection enabled by default, do a much better job of protecting customers.
The big win for me is that somewhere between Windows 7 and 10 (not sure when), Microsoft added a feature so that the OS wouldn't bluescreen if the display driver crashed -- it would fall back to its "basic", Microsoft-written driver, and try to restart the actual driver. This is just one example but imho Windows actually became more reliable over the years.
Pretty sure that happened in Vista, actually.
Version 2008 looked good, was really nice to use, easily customizable
From 2010 on it turned into a gray, depressing mess with less features (toolbar buttons almost indistinguishable from each other, no macros, toolbars can't be customized by just dragging things) .
Does this incessant desire for change/to be seen to be doing something have a name?
It came up in a political commentary I was reading (about how politicians have to be seen to do something, even if the status quo is better), and I've noticed it in the "curve of website disillusionment" for clients ("Our website is 3 years old ergo a new shiny one will be much better. No, we didn't do any research but it's obvious 'cause it's old")
How is it hard?
EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
It's gotten leaps and bounds more useful than it was 4-5 years ago. Transit directions are much easier to use. One of the only things I can complain about is that on mobile, if I've conducted a transit direction search then the results I get are for the given time. If I miss a bus or don't leave until a bit later and want to re-run the search again at the current time (some buses may have stopped running if I get delayed leavng party for example), I have to actually input the time on my phone; there's no way to re-run the search with the current time.
It's mind-blowing to me that they wouldn't make it easier to have a transit search use the current time, and instead continue to use a route from anywhere from 15 minutes-3 hours ago. Why would I even be performing the search again if I wanted the same routes.
Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a crawl - inputs take multiple seconds to register and panning/zooming runs at about 2 frames a second.
It takes about 10-15 seconds after load for the site to be fully functional and performant. That's insane.
Ditto the Satellite view. Yeah, having 3D buildings is pretty cool and all, but the performance is atrocious on even fast, modern machines. If that's the tradeoff I'll take the 2D satellite imagery back please.
Overall interacting with GMaps is itself a chore, and it almost entirely comes down to bad performance. This is especially frustrating on mobile if you put the performance of GMaps on iOS next to competitors like Apple Maps - the rendering performance is insanely low even on the most up to date hardware like an iPhone 6s.
Beyond performance problems, one thing Google didn't fix until recently was that it was literally impossible to see information on an address/place and nearby transit at the same time. They changed Transit from a persistent overlay that can be toggled to a special view mode itself, which would disable itself the moment you clicked on any point of interest on the map. It makes me wonder if anyone on the Maps team lives in a major city.
I so much hate the "new" google maps ... anybody has a alternative ? Somehow, I like the tiles of google maps best :-/
It's hard to imagine that Google would make a UI that slow given their extensive optimizations.
They aren't testing their cool WebGL version widely enough, so it fails badly for many users. (Edit: or wait, is it just a 2D <canvas>? Either way, it should be fast in Safari and it's not.)
I'm with you on the "it forgets the transportation mode" complaint, by the way; even Google Now seems incapable of using it, despite being able to parrot back the setting in the config panel.
I can kind of see their reasoning, since public transport is often time dependent, but often I don't care about specifics, I just want to get an idea what links exist, and how long I'm going to spend in transport visiting a bunch of places.
http://i.imgur.com/SaHMCF2.png
Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time. Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination.
However, Maps does reliably fill half the screen with photos, random chunks of white space, and other irrelevant visual junk as seen in the above screenshot.
I had absolutely no idea that Maps had a right-click menu, so thanks for that tip (seriously). Right-clicking on an AJAX-based Web page is obviously not a standard or expected UI concept... but given what Google has done with Maps over the last year or so, literally anything helps.
This is sadly a really common UX failure in a lot of different apps.
One thing that many people still don't seem to realize is that it's more important to be consistent than being smart. I like to call these "hide and seek" UI elements - they display conditionally in an effort to be smart (e.g., no directions are available to this place, so we hide the directions button). But in practice it just confuses users.
One thing I keep encouraging, to varying levels of success, is that UIs should always be consistent. If you are unable to provide a feature, disable that element with a helpful tip (e.g., graying out the Directions button and say "Directions not available from this address" or some such).
I know how to get directions in the new interface. I just don't like doing it. Is it more clicks? More elements taking up space I don't care about? Hijacking the native right-click menu? Aggressive resizing/panning when I didn't ask for it, to accommodate what it thinks the new context should be? I don't really know.
These are the obvious ones. There are more subtle UX fumbles too. If I click my house while I'm in my house and click directions, I probably don't want directions to my house. I probably want directions from my house.
Edit: Oh! That ridiculous thing it does when my phone vibrates. Someone decided they could detect frustration by using my accelerometer. Now any time I get a text message and am using maps, maps gets insecure and asks me to submit feedback.
I've started to use bing more recently.
This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's electronics, city, state" (remember, this is on a TOUCH KEYBOARD) to get where I want to go.
It shouldn't really be in debate that the UX of maps has gone way downhill. There's simply no comparison to the older version and I've never met anyone who wasn't disappointed by the changes.
I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock before searching, correct? (And if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?)
IP addresses are usually enough to get to the right city.
If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?
I also liked the one period of time I used to type in my US zip code for Movie Showtimes and somehow be routed to theatres and showtimes in a town outside Naples, Italy. This was on a desktop, not a phone.
Not the biggest deal in the world but it seems every useful thing Google comes up with seems to degrade in quality over time and increase in complexity.
Maybe another reason for the change is that, back in the Marissa Mayer days, hiring standards used to be much more brutal. Google was still reaping the rewards of bucking the trends of web portals jammed with ads, but eventually lost its confidence in nerd-driven products and instead began to imitate Apple, Facebook, and inexplicably, Microsoft...
My personal one is that they just can't stop tweaking. It's not like there aren't some fundamental improvements with a lot of their services but everything needs to get touched and then it ends up like that car Homer tries to design in that episode of The Simpsons.
I know that you're supposed to constantly iterate and try and improve performance, design, etc in software but is there anything in the general literature / case studies of 'improving' too much and degrading the core product(s)?
Not to mention that it's always funny to search for an issue on Google, find the links to the forum, see all the people that chime in with a similar issue, the few souls that try to help, then, as you scroll, the further desperate comments of "They don't care about us." Shouts in the wind.
One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.
Another thing that is just bafflingly absent is that GMaps doesn't know where my home and work are. Not just as locations, but as concepts. (Snide part of my brain wonders if the Maps team just lives at work.)
Another thing is that to make GMaps work with my Mac, I have to have a Chrome Extension to stop the map from freaking out. And then simple things like double-clicking to zoom in seems to have a non-predictable behavior where sometimes it zooms in and sometimes it tries to put a marker on the map.
Not everything in Gmaps is horrible. There are many nice features. But they've allowed the critical path through the software to become obscured and eroded.
Also I'm not sure but it would seem you have some kind of plugin that might be interfering as GMaps is very smooth on Mac Chrome and Safari.
And you might be single-clicking on the maps which brings up a gray marker to show you more detail of the nearest address to where you clicked. It's easier to just use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out.
And you can just put the address in the search bar and the first result on the results page should be the address detail plus links for directions.
Google Music kicks on my fan after a while. The only other thing I run that does that is Kerbal Space Program. One simulates space flight with nice (ok, decent) 3d graphics, the other plays f*cking music.
Works for me, and that's definitely one I've never explicitly set. According to my settings, the tab search just redirects to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s
I know that tapping will drop a pin, and I don't want to drop a pin, (because there's already a pin from my search and that's in the right place) so I don't want to tap. But tapping is actually what I need to do to get rid of the interface and just leave me with the map. But only after I've done whatever it is I need to do to make the GPS dot active. I'm on a bus. The GPS dot shows me where I am. The pin shows me where my destination is. Maps also shows every bus stop (I complain, but this is one of the things that makes me feel like I'm on StarTrek) but you only get the bus stops if you zoom right in. So, I spend some time zooming in and out. The map images keep loading and unloading. I kind of wish Maps would realise that I need the bus stops. I know there probably isn't a setting for that (because FUCK YOU USER WE KNOW WHAT YOU WANT) so I just keep pinch zooming and unzooming, and hoping I don't miss-pinch and un-drop the pin.
Maps is great if you use it often enough to learn it. I use it just often enough to not remember it next time I go to use it.
(All maps are amazing. I remember using Autoroute from 5 1/4" floppies and a Hercules graphics adapter and that was amazing, so GMaps on that slab of glass does feel like magic. I moan too much.)
All adblockers turned off, no errors in JS console, no other extensions installed, regular maps works fine.
I have a very long time since I used it. (I still use Google earth too).
It's like that person that your tough interview process is designed to weed out - looks good, but when you hire them and put them to work you discover that they can't code, just crib stuff from Stack Overflow and discussion boards.
With "Timeline," you dig in and find things that just don't work right like arrival and departure times (if you're going to show me at a location until 1:30PM why when I go in and drag the slider are there further data points bouncing around that location until 3PM?) and filtering of bad location recording (apparently I make several 1-minute trips a night 1 mile over to a corporate office park nearby with a cell tower).
The previous version was bad (or at least irksome and clearly designed and tested only by people on 4K monitors or with very odd mouse habits for the in-day timeline), but this one is worse because it SEEMS good until you actually look at the data.
I want that feature, but that shouldn't entitle Google to have that data on their servers.
...and the fact that I had to write this comment proves your point.
It doesn't look "modern", but if you ask me it's more usable.
Since Google has hidden the other properties behind the grid icon I've completely forgotten they were there.
Wow, I agree with you that it's visually worsened. I'm shocked at how much harder it is to visually parse information in there. It's not harder to use overall per se (from what I remember) but the number of visual indicators defining what's clickable or a message in a thread or a sliding panels hiding tags or pop-up reply panels that are just harder to work out is very surprising. I actually stumbled on an interesting piece today discussing this exact point, I forget where I saw it[0].
I admit to using desktop/clients for virtually all email stuff so going back into the web panel was a surprise to say the least.
Office 365 for email is dramatically better than GMail. Google Drive is much better, but I'm sure they will find a way to design that up too.
Hard to complain when they're free, but... I do my best.
God yes. What the hell man??