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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

Googler, opinions are my own.

For products that are core, large UI changes tend to just annoy a lot of users, unless there's something really amazing about the change. Even then, people are hesitant to like new UIs. Engineers and designers definitely want to try new things, but balancing those against messing with UIs that a billion+ people use is hard.

My general take on drive and calendar, if they are trying to improve these cases for enterprise users. There's a lot of very non-sexy work going on to make these improvements, and they aren't always visible.

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It's not "large" UI changes that are needed. (I mean, they are needed, the current google UI for most of their products sucks).

But it's small improvements that make the big difference. A small user interface element added or removed to speed up an interaction. An updated user experience so that data can be found or organized in a slightly different way.

I could pick on almost everyone of Google's products and have gripes about some UI or UX choice. Missing functionality here, overly complex there, etc. Every product has obvious low hanging fruit that could be improved.

That's what parent is referring to (I assume). There's no more micro-innovation happening. If it's not a change that makes 100 bazallion dollars, then it's just not a change worth doing, apparently.

I don’t think it’s that per se, for instance Meet has been innovating in small ways to the point where I believe it’s way better than Zoom. But not all Google tools are innovating at the same rate.

Every product has obvious low-hanging fruit that could be improved in the UX — yet the company persists in spending effort on sweeping yet entirely cosmetic changes that deliver zero value.

A good example is changing the typeface of text labels in every product to match the new Google logo, which Google seem to have been continuously doing for years on end now. I would argue this even has negative value, as it creates a mix of two typefaces (Roboto and Product Sans) in every product that used to have one, which causes every future UI design decision to be saddled with the extra cost of deciding which of the two to use.

One such example is the ability to copy my own email address. Gmail makes it so damn difficult it's mind-boggling. Whenever I try to copy my email address other elements are included in the selection, right-click is disabled and probably other annoying things happen: https://i.imgur.com/Ds0ROuT.png

Protonmail understood this and catered to this need without much fuss: https://i.imgur.com/1ZhWOsC.png

Plus it's more fun to make a new chat / meet or payment app. Apparently.

I'm sure a marketing firm specifically tailored to such startups looking for a quick exit would be rather profitable.

I don't think it came across the way I intended, because I am one of those users who don't really care for most large UI changes. It feels like UI designers are the only people in large organisations who are actually allowed to throw old code away. My point was more that non-UI improvements are extremely rare, probably because they are both difficult to get right and not "sexy" in the sense of being nicely demo-able to less technically savvy managers.

Calendar is great; but I wish it would let me edit an event the same way I can quick-enter one; from a pop-up. I'm half-inclined to write a browser ext to do it.

Also the latest updates to Sheets in the menubars have been welcome

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