Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX
danielmiessler.com
danielmiessler.com
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 have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX as much as they like, but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world. Every time Google has tried to make a major UX change -- look at Inbox, for example -- the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real. As a result, the UX tends to evolve in smaller steps, which (of course) results in the final result being more of a hodgepodge than you would get if you just started from scratch.
Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. These people know how to design good user experiences and care very much about the end result. But there is the reality of being boxed into design decisions that are difficult to undo without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. That is always an option, but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.
If one of the richest companies on the planet can't pay to hire good designers, and just pay to buyout a whole ecosystem (ie what they did with AMP), then no one can.
Rather, I think your points aside, it's a matter of executive direction and attention. Google executives doesn't give a damn about good UI. They have all the money in the world, but won't spend it on proper improvements to UI and product interfaces.
You can argue until your face is blue that the people at Google are great, very talented, but unfortunately ... if the execs don't buy into it all these talented designers/engineers are just twiddling their thumbs and making design mocks that will never see the light of day.
Or as the saying goes: have their product cancelled once they make it a good product.
I assume they have telemetry for some things. Whenever I sign into Hangouts I have to report hundreds of porn spam chats I’ve been added to - they should be seeing that. Aren’t doing anything about it though.
This seems accurate. I worked with UX teams on Cloud a lot. They _are_ brilliant. But every time the lifecycle seems to be:
1) They come out with fantastic mocks. 2) They run this by some internal committee and the design gets degraded. 3) Repeat step 2 10-20 times. 4) The final result is tiny incremental changes that look like the original UI was slightly re-shaped. 5) Rinse, repeat.
I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem. Maybe some day we can treat any UI with a long availability promise and continuously version it. Then the user can stick with their current version as long as it makes sense to them and if they want to upgrade they can do so voluntarily.
Or the complete overhauls of UIs?
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 the half-implemented crap that it is right now. Hell, just make it so that I can encrypt my emails.
Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users. You don't have to break things to provide new features.
When you have a billion users changing literally anything breaks things for some portion of your users.
Do you work in software development?
1. With that many users, you are going to break something for someone. Probably for tens of millions of someones, at the minimum.
2. At some point you will have to break something. Some of the new stuff will be incompatible with the old stuff. No one has a crystal ball.
I've written software for over 20 years. C++ mostly, a lot of Python, some Xojo.
> With that many users, you are going to break something for someone. Probably for tens of millions of someones, at the minimum.
Maybe. I don't think it's a given though.
> At some point you will have to break something. Some of the new stuff will be incompatible with the old stuff. No one has a crystal ball.
Why? At no point does making something modular have to break something. Usually when something breaks during modularization it's because it was already broken and modularization simply made it need to get fixed.
It must have something to do with management but would be curious from an insider what is going on.
Sure, they have newer UI, but the stability of their features is poor.
I think a lot of big-product UI complaints come down to: different people want different things.
The more popular a product is, the more people the company has to satisfy. It’s just simple math that as a product grows, so does the chance that some vocal people will disagree with how it evolves.
I can’t think of a mass-market software product with a UI that everyone loves. You can find UI complaints about any of them—including Facebook and Google.
Somehow, that doesn't stop companies from breaking they UX, only from fixing it.
Most of the Google software started with good usability (gmail, drive, search, maps). It got horrendous by changing.
They don't seem to have much of a problem EOL-ing products. THAT is often far more disruptive to large swathes of people. Perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions of people have been affected by various product shutdowns, and there's never any rebound from that. Making UI changes can be rolled out to groups of folks with adjustments made on feedback, then further rolled out, or ... scrapped.
What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.
Sometimes I'd love to work at Google to really understand how it works. I'm sure change is hard, but I can't understand why from the outside.
If you're implying Google can't afford it but CircleCI can, then while I understand your logic, I disagree with your understanding of reality.
If you're not, then I disagree with your understanding of logic.
I don't know Circle CI but they probably have 2 orders of magnitude fewer users. Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.
Well regardless, they still pulled off the harder technique.
One company that had done this a bit better was Salesforce with the old UI / Lightening UI switch.
OTOH why the complete revamp of Gmail's UI in 2018 or so instead of a gradual one?
Why start new chat apps from scratch every time?
Why kill Inbox?
Of course there is, therre's always someone who will be upset. The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent, despite any research or the well paid "very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers."
Where's your data on "unanimous dissent"? Also, there's often a silent majority of your products where people are totally happy with it and have zero complaints. You don't want to accidentally cater to the loud minority.
It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better". Knowing exactly what most of your users want is hard for everyone, even google.
Yeah, it is. That's exactly what Google does. All the time.
Now, we’re asking to make these changes go into a better direction. Surely we’re not asking for a massive overhaul in one big chunk, but many incremental changes, just like Google and any large organization for that matter has been doing for dozens of years.
This is a case of Google not seeing the cost/benefit equation being positive between changing the UX from it's current UXs to some other ones (within the same technological paradigm).
Sure, it might be a case of resource dependence and a lack of will to "start over". But that doesn't imply disruption as described by CC (at least not originally)
We should have a fast track and a slow and steady track.
Google has great engineers/employees that their hiring process has naturally selected for a particular types of people. This doesn't necessarily mean good. From what I've seen, Google engineers are amazing at solving hard system/foundational problems but absolutely terrible at making good products.
If you were to create a JIRA ticket asking to solve the traveling salesman problem or the like, you'll probably get a decent implementation by the end of the month before you can get a good well rounded product from Google.
Almost all Google products have regressed substantially since inception in just a few years. Gmail was snappy, quick and and had possibly the best UX in any mail client. Now it takes >20 secs on a broadband connection to give me a white-washed mess of a page with no real discerning advantage over the plain html version.
Google has the same problems and challenges you mentioned as any high scale, widely used large corp like Microsoft, Facebook, etc. has. The only difference is that the others go through periods of good-bad UX due to fast pivots, experimentation and luck.
What's the point of having these immensely talented employees if the culture/system can't actually leverage them to design something good?
The reality is that Google was a ground breaking company that rocketed to the moon, made a ton of money due to ads and now hoping to get lucky again by throwing things at a wall to see what sticks.
Google culture is now a highly risk-averse decision process system. It's the new IBM.
Spot on.
As soon as i started seeing the “a new version of gmail is coming soon, click here to try it” banner, i knew that the end of my great gmail experience was nigh.
It’s funny because i NEVER even had the slightest doubt that the new UI would be shittier, and it turned out to be just like i expected it.
Gmail got big due to their extremely snappy ui and is now used by people who cant be arsed to migrate, like is the case with yahoo mail.
And every other google ui is getting worse every week.
To the googlers here, please show me a product where the UI has actually improved and is not just a whitespace inferno.
They also gave 1-2GB of storage back before Dropbox existed (predates Dropbox by 3 years) and other free webmails gave a some megabytes. It was a far superior mail-files-to-yourself platform than anything else on the market.
Isn't it the other way round? For small start-ups, making disruptive changes is dangerous because losing important customers would kill the company whereas Google has the momentum to establish any change they want to make.
Start-ups still make disruptive changes because venture capital is eager to win big.
And yet, Gmail keeps getting redesigned every so often to the point where it's hard to figure out how basic stuff works. This is a hard argument to buy.
*It took me a decent amount of time to figure out how to add users to cc/bcc. This sort of stuff, which was easy to do in the 90s shouldn't become harder every year.
Worse, all of these products share a cpetent-looking feedback system that is completely ignored. Recently, I've seen humans responding to poor reviews in the Play Store asking for the feedback to be submitted via the in-product feedback, but everybody knows that's a black hole. If anybody actually looked at the feedback submitted that way, Google would allocate an engineer to combining feedback from the Play Store into that system instead of responding on the Play Store with pretend interest.
Another example - on Android the pull down settings menu has now changed such that the list of apps is again restricted. I have to pull it twice to see the full list.
I've been holding onto Android for a while now but Google is trying their best to make me to iOS.
What about it? It was awesome until it was killed for no reason.
Of course it was not widely used, at no point was it promoted as much as it would have deserved.
And even if it's not widely used, so what? It was already perfect. What is so bad about proposing multiple competing UIs for the same service?
Then why google change (not minor) things and make them much worse than before?
- "Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX": provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage.
- "What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?": provides zero screenshots or even textual descriptions of whatever it is these competitors have that Google should just copy.
- "How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?" I guess the words "completely" and "obsoleted" have no meaning?
The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye.
The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.
But more to the point, GA is a specialized product for an audience of (relatively speaking) power users. What is the other analytics product that purports to deliver a comparable variety of metrics, in a more useful way? That's not a rhetorical question – I honestly want to know, and expected an article with this headline to have specific and tangible comparisons.
In the case of GMail – I honestly couldn't find how to get the specific view that the author sees. I'm still using the same GMail account that I opened in its launch month, which over the years I've tweaked to my liking – such as setting "Button labels" to "Text". So I checked a relatively new alt-Gmail account, and also my main Hotmail/Live account, and was surprised to see how similar the two interfaces are.
So what is the author's point of reference when he claims "Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch". I'm looking at my Hey account right now, and sure, it's different from my GMail interface, but I also use it 0.001% as much as I do GMail, and for a much smaller subset of communications. I sure as hell wouldn't tell people Hey is so much better than GMail and expect it to be self-evident to people, not without providing visual comparisons.
You try out a bunch of changes, and one of them makes a slight uptick in the metric you're tracking. So you implement that change and kill all the other experiments, instead of iterating on the other ideas to see if you can get them to do even better than the current winner.
Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. He'd just have it changed, and he happened to have good taste. Johnny Ive tried to do the same, but his taste was hit or miss, so now they have a conglomeration of taste and data made interfaces.
Google is 100% data made interfaces. From what I understand, their PMs have no leeway to go against the data. At least at most companies the PM can still make a decision against the data, and as long as they can justify it with user studies or something else they can move ahead.
Data can tell us a lot of things, but it can't tell us everything.
> Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him.
In his book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs", author Ken Kocienda (an early engineer on Safari and the iPhone) claims Apple doesn't do any user testing to make data-driven product design decisions. Apple designers and engineers would create many prototypes and demo them up the VP reporting chain until the best prototypes got to Steve.
- 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 real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.
The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."
This is modern office equivalent of nuking the opponent in war.
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 because the Gmail app was busy dealing with a call.
I don't even know where to begin about how awful of a UX this has become. I'd give them feedback but there isn't even an obvious option to do that.
Also, I truly hate the new UIs from Google where buttons jump around. The order of "Maps", "Images" tabs in search results jumps around depending on the search and that messes with my muscle memory. Buttons just randomly disappear and appear as you scroll up and down. Names of streets and restaurants randomly disappear in navigation mode. Some buttons get bigger and smaller as you scroll. What was the product manager smoking when they called for this BS? As a user I constantly feel like I can never use my phone, and I have no way to even relay this to them. Did they even care to A/B test this stuff and analyze how many times users were e.g. hitting the back button (or other metrics of user fumbling)?
It happens all the time as organizations "mature".
This means I can’t use it because PayPal somehow let someone else add my email to their account years ago and won’t unlink it.
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.
Eye strain and inscrutable UI elements sound like concrete complaints. Whether they were phrased diplomatically, I'm not sure, and I'd concede it might be construed as venting depending on the delivery.
That being said, assuming it was brought up constructively, I see nothing wrong with the criticism except for the specific designers' refusal to consider it.
Good UI design shouldn't be strictly for design's sake, so it can be frustrating when something is difficult to use because 'looking good' was prioritized over usability.
There's a quote I've read here that I like and think is appropriate: "Accessibility is for everybody."
> 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.
was not a direct attack on the notion that professional conduct should include some degree of psychological safety?
Or perhaps this post [0] that says:
> In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.
I'm a Google SRE. I'm not actually a big fan of the Gmail interface either (and it'd be better if they actually followed material design, imo).
But this spirit is fundamentally opposed to people in corporate environments doing good work. Blameless portmortems exist for a reason. Because otherwise, every systemic or personal failure devolves into a scapegoating competition designed to find and remove the most vulnerable member of the team. My criticism is directed specifically at folks suggesting that internally peers at my workplace should harass designers.
No one mentioned venting.
No one mentioned constructive criticism.
Other than that, good job.
Responding to criticism: bring your whole emotional self! guard your mental "safety" with your life!
Let me add that Google has outsize power and influence, and the idea that we need to be nice to the corporate juggernaut is completely ridiculous.
Not at Google, but what I saw was worse than that. It was "we need more data" over and over and, on each round, I could watch other people's riskier changes just fly by without a shred of evidence that they even did what they were claimed to (let alone that they were beneficial). "Need more data" is not always just inertia. It's often a way of defending territory or enforcing hierarchy. Being "data driven" only really works when it's done consistently, and abuses called out.
Then there is measurement. Even if you can prototype, you might be forced to collect the wrong data.
Of course there's a risk for bias here, you'll be more inclined to trust a close team mate than someone with just as good arguments outside your team which can lead to unlucky territorial behavior, even when intentions are good. But at least it leaves an opening for challenge that "nah, I think it won't work and I own the code, sorry" does not.
I would be interested in seeing what kind of feedback (internal? external?) prompted this sort of response.
In other words, Google has become thoroughly bureaucratic, which means it will inevitably stagnate and die... it'll just be a very slow death.
It means they worry about losing their job when they're criticized. Like most things, it was supposed to mean actual physical danger, or at least real mental danger, but now it just means anything that threatens them in some way.
It's ironic, because that feedback could help make them better at their jobs and keep them from being fired. Instead, they force a situation where their termination is completely out of their control.
Frankly, losing your job IS an actual physical danger and a real mental danger. No income, no insurance, have to play the interview game again... Time running out, savings getting gutted (too bad COBRA costs are so high). If you can't find work, well homelessness is a very real possibility (there goes years or decades of equity). There isn't a 'limit' to how far we let people fall, and that's a shame.
I would absolutely expect people in this environment to fight tooth-and-nail for their jobs, and that might result in this kind of resistance to suggestions. Gotta keep yourself and family healthy first and foremost.
One way is to reject all criticism and attack anyone who dares to try, hopefully preventing future criticism so that maybe, just maybe, your boss won't notice your incompetence.
Another is to accept the criticism, get better, and then not have to worry about your job because you do it well.
If someone isn't capable of actually doing their job, they can't really pick the second choice. In that case, it's in everyone else's best interest to expose the situation and stabilize the company, saving their own jobs.
Cheers to the one dude somewhere inside the labyrinth who managed to fight for that feature all these years...
I want "oldest first" back. Like almost every other mail client. Everywhere.
Sigh.
In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins"
I wasn't able to recognize and distinguish different types of widgets from one another, and the design language broke with established principles. It wasn't evident how to interact with an element on the screen based on its visual qualities.
I can still remember the feeling of surprise, followed by something more like horror, as I realised they were actually being serious, and that with their weight behind it, this mess of glaring flaws that numerous critics had picked up on from day one was likely to dominate a lot of UI work for the next several years. And sure enough, many of those flaws are still there today, hardly changed.
https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...
My favorite is "We did a user study and they hated it, but a VP is pushing for it because Apple did it"
>how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work
is absurd. No wonder google lags behind a large majority of tech companies in their design approach and UI. One of the reasons why Apple has skyrocketed past google in market cap(2.01T vs 1.19T) is they put the user first, make beautiful designs that are functional and hold their value well and have excellent customer service. Google has always held customer service and help as "beneath them", its in their DNA and I don't see that ever changing.
Either they are advanced Machiavellians who adapted to the victim hierarchy as the appropriate power tool or Google has turned into a mental hospital.
Reading some Googlers on Twitter, it is hard to tell.
You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse.
Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail.
It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
I do like the fact I can have a "dark mode".
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 changes made things worse.
Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search.
Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side.
Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load.
Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs.
It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.
Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product.
It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
A decade ago, the web browser felt like an endless source of amazing content, and an RSS feed was a great way to keep track of a lot of it at once. Today, I feel like there's still great content, but it's in Twitter feeds and newsletters, and my browser is for accessing webapps and storefronts. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong content or just don't know where to go to find the good stuff anymore, but somehow the end of Google Reader was prophetic, and whether that was a self-fulfilling prophecy or not is up to each of us to decide.
The page you're interested in doesn't offer a feed? Try the integrated web feeds from your reader or another source.
I’ve always used NetNewsWire and it’s never let me down.
Why do people rememeber it fondly? Was it the fact that it was web based, or was it the only/first RSS reader people have used?
Then I went thru and tried all the competitors, new and old.
Quickly a few rose over what GR ever was and of them I settled with Inoreader - been a happy, paying customer ever since.
GR was holding down the evolution of feed readers by keeping theirs free. That was what, 5 million users not paying anybody for the service? When it was gone, things started moving forward again, fast. So actually, it's good that they closed GR.
I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most.
Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
Maybe the lesson here is that if you use one of them for years, then the other seems really bad.
I find their UI to be simple and clear. I enjoy the notes/calendar features that come with the email. Their mobile app works fine on my android phone, and the push notifications from the Fastmail calendar are relatively unobtrusive.
Only downside so far was I had to cancel my NYTimes sub (honestly probably a plus) because it doesn't recognize the @fastmail.com domain as a valid email address. It's the only service I've had that problem with, including the important ones like banking, etc.
I'd advise anyone to use their own domain, but those aliases can be a godsend.
I was unable to sign up for an Etsy account with Fastmail. They only acknowledge the majors. But I was able to sign up with gmail and then promptly change it to fastmail. Really sophisticated opsec on their part.
Now that's Gmail standard, though
you and I have a different recollection of what Gmail was at the time. Their sole differentiator was unlimited storage. Oh, and they were Google.
Google has relied on their reputation in search to carry most of their products since the early 2000s, right up until Google Plus when things started to fall apart for them and people started to realize that Google is not the invincible Superman they pretended to be. Their "don't be evil" motto was a lie and not everything they touched turned to gold. In fact, it was almost always the opposite of that.
It also introduced, and led to the broad adoption of, a few really nice features: truly effective spam filtering, conversation threading that actually works, and tags instead of folders (e.g. a message can have more than one tag, but it can only be in one folder).
At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
I don't recall it being that much better than the competitors. And even today it seems like a coin toss as to whether an obviously spam email lands in the spam folder or not. Not to mention the seemingly shady backroom deals companies like Sendgrid, SES, etc. are making to ensure their emails get delivered to the inbox. That seems like an area ripe for corruption.
> At the time, Gmail offered such a good web-based email client that many people abandoned desktop clients for it.
Anecdotal, but I very much preferred Thunderbird to Gmail, and was using it up until 2010 or so. Nowadays I use K-9 Mail (Android) where I need to and try to avoid the disaster that is modern email as much as possible.
Gmail's "threading" is probably its worst sin (beating out its weird IMAP interface). When I started using Gmail, my other mail client was mutt, but every other client at the time showed replies to email threads properly as a tree.
As an aside, you could argue that email conversations should look like a DAG (since you could totally quote multiple emails and have multiple In-Reply-To headers, why not) but I'm not aware of any clients that did that.
Gmail went a third way, completely linearizing a thread into a "conversation". This view makes it harder to have discourse over email: if you want to make sure to split a conversation and have both forks get addressed, you have to change the subject line to un-thread replies to your message.
Google Mail's spam filtering is many things, but I don't see why it's been particularly effective. Adaptive spam filtering was already being done before GMail came along, and unlike GMail's approach, the filters in other popular email clients didn't lurch so far towards avoiding false negatives that they all but broke normal email by having so many false positives.
Where Google Drive promised in the past "unlimited" storage, I can now provide for myself for cheaper and better.
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 download Chat". Well that just weird, but okay, I can uninstall Chrome afterwards, no problem. Imagine my surprise when launching Chat also launched Chrome. I disregard this as being something Chat just do on first launch. Existing Chrome however also closed Chat.... Okay. Uninstall Chrome then, that should teach Chat to no fool around with Chrome. Now Chat doesn't work, because what Google doesn't tell you is that Chat is now a progressive web app. The icon is pretty though.
Chat can be a web app all it want, but it doesn't get to launch Chrome, I don't want that abomination running all day. The current fix is apparently to install via Home Brew, that downloads a stand-alone app. Google claims the new version is stand-alone, but if it was to launch Chrome it's not really stand-alone is it.
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 native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?
and yet the latest-and-greatest cross platform framework is supposed to be Flutter
...But it's still better than Google telling the parent they have to install Chrome to install Google Chat.
Facebook gave up on the one app and does native apps for the major phones for a reason: native is faster, ultimately more powerful and you have more control to fix bugs.
The majority of the underlying libraries wouldn't necessarily need to be changed; "only" the UI layer and some of the APIs (which is non-trivial, but doable).
My aunt is pretty locked to Google platforms, she is the person who trains their platforms at her work... and you know what, the idea that she could "just use Skype" didn't even strike her mind:
It's already installed on my grandma's Windows PC, she already has a Microsoft account anyways, and it "just works", popping up a "[aunt] is calling] dialog when she gets a call. Skype worked great, and it's available on every platform.
It really starts to amaze me that Google doesn't understand the importance of that level of integration and simplicity considering their supposed market being "everyone". My aunt had been considering buying a Google Home/Nest/whatever it is today or an Android tablet, just to use one app to call my grandmother.
But my grandmother already has her PC open, and Skype "just works". It rings like a phone and it has a big green button to answer it.
In case anyone was wondering why Apple is going with the "iOS/iPadOS apps on the desktop" route, it's because this is so incredibly common; great, first-class mobile apps and nearly unusable, garbage Electron-based desktop apps.
Edit: Plus, in regards to Google, something about Chromebooks. A good desktop app on a Chromebook is just a web app that works well in Chrome. Why make a desktop app for what they seem to think is just an outdated computing metaphor using APIs they don't control?
I see this opinion a lot, but Apple Maps is pretty great now. Bing Maps is excellent. HERE Maps has been a big one I relied on for a number of years too.
I mean, their web UI is slow, but MapQuest... actually still does it's job pretty darn well too. I used their API for a program I wrote.
If you had used anything but Google, you'd realize everyone else has these features too.
Bear in mind, Bing Maps powers a world-scale reproduction of the world for Flight Simulator... you thought that didn't have 3D models of buildings? It does have to fill in a lot of missing data, but it does start on a very good foundation.
- Apple Map : Better street view than Google. The scenes look more natural and having a higher point of view is much better but the point of interest is quite unfocused and their map app acts quite weirdly and very laggy under 3D and almost unusable. Funny their UI guideline always says not to block UI process but they can't do that themselves.
- Bing map : Map is very good. Point of interest is fairly placed but their satellite view is very rough in Japan. Searching is weird. If I search for "California" I get taken to some location in Columbia with that name... And not sure how they don't support Android? I get redirected to their search site when I visit maps.
- HERE map : I suppose this is US only? I checked a Japanese location and there's 1 big road in a major city and nothing else...
- MapQuest : Not really competing...
All in all, there are a few better things here and there for other maps, but nothing really beats the overall quality of Google maps at this point.
HERE is based in Chicago, so it's possible I have a drastically better experience with this than average. I probably get their best as a local resident. As for who they are: They got bought up by a big auto conglomerate, you'll find their software on a lot of car nav systems. (EDIT: It's actually based in the Netherlands, but there's a pretty big Chicago team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies and https://www.builtinchicago.org/company/here-technologies)
I'd be pretty surprised if Bing Maps doesn't support Android, given that's Microsoft's recommended mobile platform. I haven't used an Android in years though.
I use Apple when I use Maps these days, but that's because it's already on my phone and it's been good enough every rare occasion I've needed it.
For a search company, it's embarrassing how hard it is to search for things in their office suite.
We inadvertently ended up with a weird heirarchy like A -> B -> C, where A was owned by user 1, B was owned by user 2, and C was owned by user 3, and everything was just shared with everyone else.
Then one day while cleaning up the account of a user who had left, I inadvertently un-shared "myself" (her account) from everything that everyone had shared with her.
This apparently resulted in her Drive account going through everything that had been shared with her and removing it from the directory it was in. In this case, Drive un-shared C to her, removing it from B, then un-shared B from her, removing it from A. Now all of those files still existed, and were still shared to everyone else, but there was no hierarchy to them anymore, at all.
This was a completely massive pain in the ass, meaning that one of our project managers had to recreate the entire directory structure, then go through every document that their knew of, search for it in their Drive, find what folder it was in, and then put it into the right place in the hierarchy.
Thankfully, they were the kind of person who had wanted to go through and reorganize for years, so aside from the sudden and completely unmanagable imposition on their time, they were pretty stoked to have a reason to deal with it. I, on the other hand, learned to just never touch Drive at all and migrate everyone to Team Drives instead.
Which it turns out you can't safely share to users outside of your organization. Fucking great. Thanks, Google.
Also, if you want to talk about bad UX on Google products, I could write a book on frustrations I have with using Maps.
It works in Mac Chrome. No workaround that I can find.
This is a regression from say, 2 years ago. I used to be psyched that I could use GDocs for work but now I hate that I'm forced to use it for work.
If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my migration to Fastmail.
The reason "move to [label]" is at the top of the screen is because that action affects the whole thread, not one message in the thread.
Star is attached to a message or a thread, so that should be in both menus, but in practice the mobile (iOS) app only lets you star a thread from the threadlist, while desktop web lets you star a thread while reading it. This is inconsistent.
Important is again in the thread's menu because it's an attribute of threads, not messages.
Read-ness is again an aspect of messages, not threads.
Google Drive is so much more straightforward and I can reliably find parts of that app much easier than Dropbox's current UI.
I could tell a similar story about Notion, though it is newer. While Evernote doesn't give you enough affordances, instead almost forcing you do use its internal search for everything, Notion gives you far too many affordances, leading to a tendency to create monstrous, unusable systems where information goes to die. Also, it is slow.
Google Docs, on the other hand, has been a consistent workhorse for both my personal and professional needs ever since its inception. Google Docs does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. In Google Drive, you move a Doc file around the way you would move a file around on your computer. Docs/Drive have never lost data due to a sync issue, or left me confused about where a file went. I like this. I want it to stay this way.
As for the UX on the Google Analytics ... yeah, the Facebook Ads interface is also completely opaque. I feel like this class of products is being optimized for something other than the feeling of transparency, and is instead cultivating particular workflows used by power users.
That said, there is no question that things rot at google.
One thing other companies do but google does not - listen to customers just a bit.
My favorite is of course, google home can't get gsuite calendars, but I can setup alexa to get them fine (so whatever technical / secuirty argument there might be doesn't really hold).
This has been a top request for years? I wouldn't be surprised if it turns into a decade. Zero action.
This is just throughout things - they do the 90% solution, and WILL NOT touch the 10% you stub your toes on. If they just would tweak and fix a few things ANNUALLY they'd be very competitive.
After 8 years of folks asking for this we got https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleassistantforgsuit...
How in the world is this so hard? I look forward to checking out the link, it needs to be more than multiple accounts, it needs to support PAID workspaces accounts.
I've just been around this again though with google family accounts, I couldn't accept the invite. And it hits you everywhere.
WTF Google???
This isn't to say they don't have lots of user interface designers, or that they don't get branding. It's that they lack a modern creative direction vision that connects those two functions.
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.
Sometimes it rings for email, sometimes not, when I go to the screen to turn on/off it's all greyed out.
I can have 'up to N' rings per day for certain things which simply doesn't make sense in most situations (missing sms?).
WTF is going on?
We are facing 'complexity disasters' all around us and Google is not the only culprit.
Hint: your product is completely useless unless you've made it clear and easy to use. We don't care 'what it does' until it is at least that.
Even though Material UI is functional, there is something off about it. Something is weird about it, and I can't tell what. Maybe there's a word for it. It feels/looks cheap, like designed for the lowest common denominator device. Like... at least add a backdrop filter/blur to it, it gives a different feeling. The current flat design feels dead and soul less.
The only place where material UI is suitable is Google search. Not Gmail, not GCP and DEFINATELY NOT on stock android.
https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/520631248826294272
This thread from 2001 is also an interesting read: https://slashdot.org/story/01/06/25/1316227/google-plans-an-...
Whoah whoah whoah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
To start with, which part of the Windows 10 UI are you specifically referencing? It's quite the hodgepodge.
They do care in the early stages when there’s an opportunity for quick growth (and promotions for those involved)
Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know.
I read somewhere that Marissa Meyer was responsible for that feature.
That website is a showcase of amazing ideas that needed time and nurture to come to fruition, but were executed like a poor earning Mafioso having a bad week.
Recently with blueprintjs, notion, fluent design, and whatnot things I think have started to change for better. And then there is always apple doing its thing.
• Picture-on-Picture has been artificially blocked on iOS for years.
• Autoplay next video but no auto-repeat, what the fuck?
• Weirdass TikTok-wannabe format for short videos that you can't save in your playlists along with other limitations.
• Comments have been broken and unmoderated since forever.
• Hard to access all your playlists and edit them.
• Can't scroll through the comments while viewing the video on desktop, but you can on mobile.
The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead.
What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.
One thing they could do that would be universally good is making their apps light weight. The next billion users, as google refers to them, do not have the latest flagship devices.
Like what?
> How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?
What startups?
It's perfectly fine to critique Google UI/UX as "horrible", but if one going to do that, there needs to some examples of UI/UX which are excellent for those kinds of applications.
So, who does noteworthy UI/UX ?
Gmail feels today like the web mail on my cPanel hosting felt like when I switched to Gmail.
Gmail has been "fine" for my needs, but now that I think about it, the filter and label dialogs have always been a pain in the ass. They've been more or less the same since the beginning, one would think that Google would freshen this stuff up-- but no. Moreover, gmail has become more aggressive about "categorizing" stuff on my behalf.
Will check it out. I think a key thing for me will be stability and the ability to transition my shit to another provider if needed.
Strong, competent product management balances user needs, marketplace conditions (competing and complementary products), and technological factors to create optimal products. What we see from the outside are products that are technologically strong, but suffer from lack of useful user perspective and market awareness.
Google will never create new (i.e. post search and AdWords) great products until it undergoes a complete cultural transformation toward a product management-focus.
And do we know they were misled about their roles? You might think "manage" means "lead", but it doesn't.
I expected that things would get better eventually, but that has not been the case.
Having no way to do self-reflection to treat this problem is a bad sign that people inside Google are perhaps getting out of touch with what is really going out there. Or that there is enough inertia to block good design changes to pass through. Whatever it is, I would hope they would start stepping out of their own bubbles to actually understand what type of interfaces people like to use. Visit the factories with the machine consoles where there is only simple buttons and easy-to-understand menus for everything. And then try to retrace their path to the current interfaces and think why they have to be like what they are right now.
It's like relationships, you probably get attracted at first by the appearance of things but it is when that wears off you get the sense of what the other person really is. With UIs, that novelty can wear off pretty quick if it feels like pulling out teeth to use it (Google Analytics is one horror show).
Anyone remembers when Google bought the Chromium team, Chrome was first launched, and it was lauded as the fastest and lightest browser? Fast forward today, and Chrome is the epitome of sluggishness, a godzilla of a browser. Gmail? Same – horrible, bloated, slow. Google G-Suite? Same. Android? Symbol of inefficiency, barely usable after throwing tens of gigs of RAM, CPU and huge batteries. Google Cloud Console? Piles of steaming slow foam.
It's almost as if, show me a product that Google does that is fast today, other than the bare minimum Google home page search box.
On one hand, they're facing erosion of product management. On the other hand, it's no longer an Engineering-driven company in the sense their engineering is not able to drive atleast that UI/UX to work performant.
That's exactly what animals and the military do to disguise themselves: They break their own shape and outline so it can't be snap-recognized as being distinct from the environment.
Google's new icons do exactly that, except that app icons should be snap-recognizable. Now they're a herd of zebras where you can't tell where one begins and another ends.
Someone ran a colorblindness filter on them. Predictably, they looked better because turning everything non-blue into yellow made the shapes more coherent.
Over on Analytics, you're not reading stuff and clicking upgrade/migrate whatever and then complaining. Lame man. Yeah, it's complicated, maybe too much for casual users like yourself but it's also complicated for power users who are doing all sorts of things at different levels with it.
And this idea that EOL-ing products that everyone on here complains about every single week is all based on magical speculation that it affects 'large swathes of people... perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions'. You're in a bubble man, not that many ppl were affected by Reader shutdown. Inbox. Etc. The Inbox features made their way into Gmail as the one Googler describes features evolve in smaller steps. And everyone moved on from Reader but RSS never died as a tech anyways so geezus, follow some twitter streams or sign up to some newsletters and get with it.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812
It's very hard for me to find a good explanation for why this isn't the normal performance.
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.
As for the stuff on the message level, left-pointing arrow has meant "reply" since the very first graphical MUA, the star is universal design language across Google properties including Chrome, and the three vertical dots for more actions is very common within and without Google.
I get confused so much nowadays with the icons, and many apps no longer even have an option to expand and show the labels. And all the labels are mono-color too, no more colorful icons that help make them distinguishable.
Maybe not as slick as other startsup/apps - but it aligns well with me.
The one major thing I'd suggest to Google is to have a better Drive search.
Google has a long way to go.
I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards.
And notice that the goose is always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter.
This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world.
These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.
The UI is so unprofessional and confusing - really made me miss Microsoft (which is far away from being excellent).
On YouTube I have to close two dialogs, before I can start watching videos. Very annoying.
What kills me is that when I hit the button to go fullscreen in YouTube, the first thing that happens after the transition to fullscreen is a carousel-like overlay of other "related" videos. Uh, OK, Google, why do you think I hit the fullscreen button, anyway? Because I want to watch this one.
The monkeys are running the zoo over there.