Google's Weakness: User Experience | Hacker News Reader

Google's Weakness: User Experience

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10 pointsamirhirsch5 comments

I also have similar problems with Google, but I think it is dangerous to extrapolate from a sample of us. Most people are not going to have multiple accounts in the first place.

However I had assumed that almost all Google employees would have multiple accounts - a personal one a work one - and would be experiencing this pain. Maybe Google employees don't actually use their own products like the public and customers do?

The user feedback thing is what will lead to Google's demise. I was absolutely shocked that I could I could actually submit an electronic issue for Android Market issues (the pagination doesn't work, any app ever installed even if uninstalled a few minutes later is shown forever). However the resulting support was the standard thing you get when it has been outsourced to the lowest bidder - your text is parsed for the closest match to the 10 canned answers they have which doesn't help, and then you get a 'satisfaction' survey where it is obvious what metrics they are measured on.

Android is not quite as bad, but still problematic. A public bug tracker where issues are ignored for years, and Google+ hangouts which of course require using G+ and participating at an exact time. I still want some very misleading text on the Google Analytics for Android page to be addressed: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9694639/more-than-one-bro...

Seth Godin has some good wisdom on the whole issue. I like his description of companies having "a stall, deny and avoid policy when it comes to customer interaction".

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/03/reorganizing...

I think two accounts is pretty common even outside geekdom. Lots of non-techies have gmail as their personal email (even my parents do). And lots of companies and schools are using Google apps for business email.

The intersection of the two must include a reasonable number of non-techies...

Agree with the rest of your point too, it is really strange that you literally can't get support on google products, even if you pay for them as a business.

My mother's school system just switched to Google Apps. Some ensuing confusion -- amongst other things, with Google's/Gmail's repeated GUI rearrangements, she'd lost track of and forgotten about the sign-out command in her personal Gmail account.

I've similarly watched and helped her and others struggle with unintuitive controls e.g. in Google Calendar.

Google may worry tons "about a shade of blue". But their real user experience seems to depend upon individual projects and perhaps individuals. The original search results page and early Gmail were high points. Some other items have languished or declined under counter-productive development.

One day, Google Plus's suggestions for "friends" I should add to circles included 2 people I'd already circled, 2 versions of another person, and even another version of myself!

So, yes, multi-account Google stuff is painful. I don't know why they don't see that and fix it.

Be careful what you wish for.

I used to wish for better integration between Google's various products. Now we have what we have, and I don't use Google anymore. Ironically, G+ was the service I was most excited about from any vendor in recent memory, and their management of that was what finally pushed me out of the nest. At this point they're only a backup account, like Yahoo used to be before they dropped me for inactivity.

So yeah, Google could decide to integrate your multiple accounts, but I expect their implementation of that to piss off a lot of people.

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