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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> gmail team was asleep at the wheel on this one

No. They intentionally drove off the road for fun and somehow didn't understand humans enough to realize that it would be really infuriating to some of their ~1 billion users.

They did the same thing with their "Call your Dad today" calendar reminder and many other things. Google's product teams seem to be both deaf (help forums overflowing with "+1s" for simple fixes) and tone-deaf.

This whole thing makes me realize I should just switch to Microsoft's apps/ecosystem and retain my Gmail address. There's no reason to put up with Google's terrible product decisions anymore.

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It seems to be a combination of the Silicon Valley echo chamber + groupthink. They're completely ignorant of any perspective that isn't their own.

It's the one thing I hate about Android. The UIs of Google apps have gotten consistently worse over the years, mainly because they've been prioritizing aesthetics over functionality/ease of use.

I'm assuming their thought process is something along the lines of "This is obvious to me. Therefore, it will be obvious to the millions of Android users". No, it's obvious to you because you just thought of it, it's most definitely not obvious to everyone else.

> didn't understand humans enough

> They're completely ignorant of any perspective that isn't their own.

It's like people commenting on Hacker News have never made a mistake or have something backfire at them.

It's not like I'm in a position to do so anyway, but I would never consider implementing some kind of prank into a vital service that hundreds of millions of people use on a daily basis. Let alone a prank that could be so easily mistaken for a core function of the service.

Words can't even begin to describe how arrogant/stupid this was, and now users are paying the price.

Not all mistakes are born equal in reach and consequences. I would like to think that yes, most people in HN (most people, period) would not make a mistake like this.

>>It seems to be a combination of the Silicon Valley echo chamber + groupthink. They're completely ignorant of any perspective that isn't their own.

This is totally expected when your employees are overwhelmingly in their 20s and have never held a job outside of a tech company in the valley.

My old company was full of developers like that. Fresh out of college, doesn't know how the real world works, yet is expected to develop products for the real world. It was horribly frustrating working with them.

> It's the one thing I hate about Android. The UIs of Google > apps have gotten consistently worse over the years, mainly > because they've been prioritizing aesthetics over > functionality/ease of use.

Care to elaborate on this with a few examples? I have the opposite complaint. They seem to be focussing on ease of use precisely at the expense of functionality. I'd rather stuff was a little more complicated, because it would give me more control over stuff. Note that I don't want it complicated for the sake of complexity. But I've noticed a increase in "adding features makes stuff complicated" and joke memes about "just make it an option". Well, programming - proper programming - IS hard, but it's worth it because you get a better product.

Not an Android feature, but similar. Last year someone at Google thought it would be smart to redesign the bookmark feature in Chrome to make it more aesthetic looking. Instead it completely made Chrome bookmarks useless. They eventually changed course and updated Chrome to return to the way it was.

On Android, I really don't have any problems.

Google maps UI has gotten much worse over the last few years in terms of usability > aesthetics. It not even close to being intuitive anymore.

Also not Android, but Google has rendered the App Engine/Compute Engine dashboard completely useless. Double overlapping sidebars and a huge amount of wasted space everywhere makes simple tasks like finding a log entry difficult. The old design at appengine.google.com which Google is slowly deprecating was highly functional despite not being flat and "pretty." This is just one example. It's my personal opinion that Google is showing a tremendous lack of design ability in areas that they should be getting right at this point.

/rant

Of all the Google things that doesn't need to imitate a spare Apple design, it's APPENGINE

Here's a big example: a lot of what they release these days is for mobile first, and if the desktop-geared version is ever released, its design is just the mobile app in a bigger window. Example: Google Photos.

(Related: WTF did they have to deprecate the old Photos and Picasa, which still have much superior options? They only "advantage" the new Photos has is the so-called AI, e.g. ability to auto-categorize your pictures of dogs.)

Despite all the recent ai hype it still sucks whenever I use it. All my photo categories have wrong entries in them.

Makes you wonder if the huge campuses in SF is really a good idea.

Its far from limit to Google. I wonder if it is a geek/SV thing, as i keep seeing "solutions" come out of there that are hopelessly utopian in their naivety when it comes to considering human behavior and reactions.

It isn't limited to Google. At the end of 2014 Facebook put this thing in my brother's feed that said "It's been a great year" and then put in post he made right after our mother passed away. I wonder if it's a being young thing too?

Facebook, specifically, is struggling with the issue that strong correlation doesn't imply semantic value (i.e. posts with a lot of activity can be really good OR really bad) and corner cases. The semantic value issue they're addressing with the multifaceted "like" button.

The corner cases issue may not be fixed. As harsh as it is to say---and as unacceptable, perhaps, as it should be to work this way---there is a train of thought that goes "Even if we get the occasional bad result, when we have a billion users and 99% of the results are good; ship it. That's 990 million happy customers." The 1% bad results have to be really bad to tip the scales.

For such integral products, I'd expect them to have some sort of concept of "out of all your users, some of them will be having the worst day/week/month/year of their lives while heavily interacting with your product".

I recall hearing about that one. One guy had a image of his recently deceased daughter plastered across the screen...

> This whole thing makes me realize I should just switch to Microsoft

Right, MS. Way better product decisions...

You got significantly downvoted for some reason, and I'm not sure why, especially in light of Microsoft's most recent embarrassment (http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-cha...).

Do people perceive, perhaps, that there's a difference between "corporate Microsoft" and "AI research Microsoft," and the former would never make a mistake with their products like the latter has? I find that a less-than-likely assumption.

Microsoft makes annoying product mistakes like everybody else and obviously isn't immune to PR blunders.

However, they're also pleasingly boring and know where their bread is buttered, so I sort of do trust them not to introduce April Fools Day jokes into their important business applications.

MS had Easter Eggs hidden in Office software. They stopped as part of their Trustworthy Computing initiative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microso...

The Mic drop feature was stupid, but it wasn't included for people who were Google Apps business, education or government users.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/5aOAnuG...

> This whole thing makes me realize I should just switch to Microsoft's apps/ecosystem and retain my Gmail address. There's no reason to put up with Google's terrible product decisions anymore.

Why specifically mention Microsoft? Seems like you could have concluded you 'should' switch away from Google's ecosystem without coupling it to your desire to switch to Microsoft.

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