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Keyframe

What a shitty user experience. What changed at google? They used to have these rather simple, useful, UIs.

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I don't even know what I'm looking at here.

It renders incorrectly, had zero info and just shows me pictures of Hollywood celebrities.

Designers and product managers have taken the reigns from the engineers.

Recall that Google at one time never had TV advertisements. Now you can't turn the damn thing on without seeing one.

Exactly. After all, it's pretty much how Apple made its historic unprecedented profits: more designers than engineers.

Really? What Google commercials have you seen recently?

Constant Chrome/cast/book and Nexus tablet ads. I've seen this one far too much:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LysTmwDan8

Any designer that knows what they are doing makes things easier to use, not more difficult.

I think it would be better to say 'Amateurs have taken the reigns'.

Wow. I am not the only one that felt like this.

That was such a horribly designed UI. I had no idea what I am looking at and why. Google used to all about simplicity. I remember in prior years these kind of posts always had graphs and considerable text explaining trends. Its like someone there realized they are JS experts.

No, you're not alone. When they offer data, a lot of us think, "Oh, goodie, some interesting data!" We hustle over there to learn something new and learn it quickly.

If instead we are treated to a demonstration of javascript media virtuosity that buries the actual data too deeply to be worth extracting, we get annoyed and complain: "Where's the beef?" (But I don't think there's anybody back there[1].)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0

In Chrome I get an empty dark blue screen unless I tell Ghostery not to block the Google +1 tracker.

I hit the button to say exactly that, but you beat me to it. It's unbelievably bad, even by Google's rapidly declining standards....

I gave the video about 2 seconds before closing the tab.

I went through it, I always give a chance to content no matter how presented it is ( a habit of mine). However, it didn't tell me anything. It's like a run-of-the-mill motivation video. To make things worse, I couldn't get to the results of zeitgeist on my own to see what was actually going on.

It looks pretty, and I am sure lots of work was put into it and I appreciate that. But it's uninspired and isn't very functional. I expect functionality first from google. Well, I used to.

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