'Google is Getting Left Behind Due To Horrible UI/UX' (danielmiessler.com) 269
Daniel Miessler, a widely respected infosec professional in San Francisco, writes about design and user experience choices Google has made across its services in recent years: I've been writing for probably a decade about how bad Google's GUI is for Google Analytics, Google Apps, and countless of their other properties -- not to mention their multiple social media network attempts, like Google+ and Wave. Back then it was super annoying, but kind of ok. They're a hardcore engineering group, and their backend services are without equal. But lately it's just becoming too much.
1. Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch.
2. 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?
3. What college course do I take to manage a Google Analytics property?
4. Google just rolled out Google Analytics 4 -- I think -- and the internet is full of people asking the same question I am. "Is this a real rollout?"
[...] My questions are simple:
1. How the hell is this possible? I get it 10 years ago. But then they came out with the new design language. Materialize, or whatever it was. Cool story, and cool visuals. But it's not about the graphics, it's about the experience.
2. How can you be sitting on billions of dollars and be unable to hire product managers that can create usable interfaces?
3. How can you run Gmail on an interface that's tangibly worse than anything else out there?
4. How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?
I've heard people say that Google has become the new Microsoft, or the new Oracle, but damn -- at least Microsoft is innovating. At least Oracle has a sailing team, or whatever else they do. I'm being emotional at this point.
Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces. Focus on the experience. Focus on simplicity. And use navigation language that's similar across your various properties, so that I'll know what to do whether I'm managing my Apps account, or my domains, or my Analytics. You guys are awesome at so many things. Make the commitment to fix how we interact with them.
1. Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch.
2. 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?
3. What college course do I take to manage a Google Analytics property?
4. Google just rolled out Google Analytics 4 -- I think -- and the internet is full of people asking the same question I am. "Is this a real rollout?"
[...] My questions are simple:
1. How the hell is this possible? I get it 10 years ago. But then they came out with the new design language. Materialize, or whatever it was. Cool story, and cool visuals. But it's not about the graphics, it's about the experience.
2. How can you be sitting on billions of dollars and be unable to hire product managers that can create usable interfaces?
3. How can you run Gmail on an interface that's tangibly worse than anything else out there?
4. How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?
I've heard people say that Google has become the new Microsoft, or the new Oracle, but damn -- at least Microsoft is innovating. At least Oracle has a sailing team, or whatever else they do. I'm being emotional at this point.
Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces. Focus on the experience. Focus on simplicity. And use navigation language that's similar across your various properties, so that I'll know what to do whether I'm managing my Apps account, or my domains, or my Analytics. You guys are awesome at so many things. Make the commitment to fix how we interact with them.
waaah waaah (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that stuff looks fine, what's this guy's problem? Does he want shiny eye candy? Just needs to work, not look pretty.
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Yeah, it's so fucking horrible that hundreds of millions of people use it. Clearly Google is failing badly on designing its user interface.
Once you achieve market dominance... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's so fucking horrible that hundreds of millions of people use it.
Turns out that once you achieve market dominance and become the de-facto standard, your user interface can suck.
Changing has a cost. People will continue with an annoying interface (that they've learned how to work with) rather than pay the price to learn a possibly better new one.
God, we still use QWERTY keyboards. Case closed.
Re:Once you achieve market dominance... (Score:5, Informative)
Long story...
Have you ever seen a mechanical typewriter? Not electric, not a computer keyboard, but a mechanical typewriter? The way these worked was you pressed down on a key--and you have to press it down an inch or so--which would cause an arm with the letter debossed on the end to come up and strike the ribbon which would end up printing the letter on the paper. It's pretty clever--check some antique stores for one.
The problem was that if one arm was coming down while another arm was coming up, they could get stuck together. And then you had to stop and clear it up.
So the QWERTY keyboard was designed to solve this by putting common letters near the same hand so you were less likely to have two arms interfere with each other. So the keyboard is explicitly designed to slow down your typing speed for mechanical typewriters, which probably went away about 60 years ago (if not more).
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That is simply not true.
QWERTY was not designed to slow down typists. That's a myth and nonsense on its face.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/ [smithsonianmag.com]
As that article points out, it should be easy enough to debunk just by noting that a layout designed to slow you down should maximize the distance between common letter combinations, and 'er' is the fourth most common pairing in the English language!
There is also evidence to suggest that the layout
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Hold on I thought it was to separate keys that were likely to be used consecutively to reduce jamming chances.
Re:Once you achieve market dominance... (Score:4, Informative)
It is. The GP is perpetuating a lie by Dvorak and his fans. Qwerty was designed to win typing competition by making it possible to type faster than we other layouts. Though part of that speed came from the reduced chance of jamming.
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No it wasn't. That is a lie by a guy named Dvorak.
Qwerty was designed to WIN typing competition which it did for decades before becoming the defacto standard.
Re: waaah waaah (Score:2)
Seriously, an ad populum fallacy and people who are clearly too young to have seen a good UI? Those make the author an idiot?
I wonder if they think the most popular music video on YouTube is good music too.
No, serioulsy, I wonder if they even know Shift-$ArrowKeys, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V anymore, and believe "touch screens are superior, grandpa".
Oh how Slashdot has fallen.
Re:waaah waaah (Score:5, Informative)
Quantity != Quality.
By this retarded logic McDonalds servers gourmet burgers, right? /s
People tend to use whatever is popular. They also don't know (or care) about bad UI. They just want to get their shit done.
Complaining to google will do fuck all unless people start making a big stink about it.
Here is one example on how Gmail is shit:
Normally the send button is blue #1a73e8. When you press TAB to navigate to the SEND button it highlights in light blue #5094ed showing it has focus.
Notice how the next button to the right, the [A] button with the A underlined, "Formatting options", is grey when it is active. When you press TAB it SKIPS over that button. The WHOLE point of using TAB is to navigate to the next UI element, not skip them!
Worse, the background for the button when active should be a DIFFERENT highlight color then the focus background color.
This isn't rocket science. This is basic 101 UI/UX design stuff that Google apparently seems completely clueless about.
Just because you don't see the problem doesn't imply there isn't one. There is. You just aren't aware of what the problem is.
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Yeah, it's so fucking horrible that hundreds of millions of people use it. Clearly Google is failing badly on designing its user interface.
I am sorry I can't mod you up for elegant simplicity of this argument, but I have no mod points, so I guess I have to comment. I fully agree. UI design seems to be a lot more about personal preference and flashiness than any real usability issues. For example, look at Amazon. Their UI has been the same forever. It's sure not flashy. But it totally works and it's easy to find stuff. I live in fear that one day people like the guy who wrote the article bitching about Google will get control of th
Re:waaah waaah (Score:5, Informative)
Just an FYI, Amazon does change their interface from time to time, but they do it in a limited fashion for a limited time. X-many users will be randomly selected to get the slightly different interface (there's never been a full revamp that I'm aware of) and their interactions monitored for a time. If the change seems to make it faster and/or easier for the user it will be rolled out to a larger audience and they'll be monitored again. The process is extremely data-driven (as the whole company is), **BUT** user anecdotes also hold an outsized role since if someone is annoyed (or pleased) enough to write it down then the impact is larger than the data might suggest.
If you look at the Amazon interface from a decade ago and the one today there are several changes, but they were introduced so gradually that almost no one notices.
*Full Disclosure* I work at Amazon, but nothing to do with this.
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While not buttons and drops, it's a visible change in functionality.
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Re:waaah waaah (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the web in general is a horrible platform that requires an unbelievable amount of UI code to badly replicate native apps. I don't see gmail as being any better or any worse than any other. They all suck. It's a pity the browser has become a major platform, I prefer native apps, but seeing as I'm forced to so often use my browser as an app platform, I can't see Google's is any better or any worse.
Oh, and fuck you too.
Re:waaah waaah (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the web in general is a horrible platform that requires an unbelievable amount of UI code to badly replicate native apps. I don't see gmail as being any better or any worse than any other. They all suck. It's a pity the browser has become a major platform, I prefer native apps, but seeing as I'm forced to so often use my browser as an app platform, I can't see Google's is any better or any worse.
Oh, and fuck you too.
Native apps are in a framework and, at least on Windows and Mac, they gave consistency, and were a solved problem. NEXTSTEP also looked very nice. As did Be.
But then people who had no business designing UIs started messing around with stuff, and Windows 98 looked absolutely awful. Even something as simple as choosing a harmonious colour palette was done badly. I can tell you I hated Win 98 for the colours alone, never mind anything else!
Then the web came along and admittedly there was very little to offer the site "designer" so everyone made up their own thing. That probably set a lot of bad habits, and web design was just a weird play space where they never knew if they were creating a magazine or an application.
Meanwhile macOS tended by culture to have better designed interfaces, although over the years and with "innovation" it got some absolutely awful things in there.
But Google is just awful, not awful at design but awful because they don't know how to do design. Their design IQ is nonexistent.
There is something fundamentally wrong or broken or lacking in their culture, when it comes to design. Apple on the other hand, for all their many design faults, created the iPhone interface from scratch and was immediately widely copied (remember that the predecessors were Microsoft trying to collapse a desktop UI onto a tiny screen, and Blackberry had its own thing). Did you see Apple try to collapse Mac OS onto a tiny screen? No of course not they rethought the whole thing from first principles.
Google needs to let some real design become important, for its own sake. Not just because it has to be demonstrated in some objective testable way that it changes their revenue or some other silly metric. Yes we know the money counts, but you are eroding your brand, and one day one of your key products will fail not because of a lack of market or engineering prowess, but because it lacked design.
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Okay, we all agree. Google is awful at design. If the Pixel 3XL didn't convince you they had no concept of design, nothing will. With their latest Pixels, they've at least had the sense to release a genuine bargain, and reduce the 'design' to simple functionality. Good choice.
But my question is, what is the purpose of Google Docs - or even gMail? At one point, they needed more than just search to blunt Microsoft's still ongoing attempts to dominate computing - and in the process starve Google of the ox
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I think the web in general is a horrible platform that requires an unbelievable amount of UI code to badly replicate native apps.
Not anymore. Have you tried WebAssembly? Many desktop frameworks can run directly in the browser.
Re:waaah waaah (Score:4, Insightful)
>Android is better than iOS?
Yes, because it allows you to install any software you want.
>Windows is better than Linux?
Yes, on desktop. "Year of linux on desktop" is a meme for a reason.
>Honda Civic is better than Ferrari?
Obviously. Ferraris are exceedingly limited in their ability to function as a method of personal transportation. Only on good roads, only two people and without many of the comforts of a typical sedan such as actually good vision out of the car, almost no storage space and barely a fraction of reliability.
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> So using your logic popularity = better UI/UX.
> Android is better than iOS? Windows is better than Linux? Honda Civic is better than Ferrari?
Clearly you've never driven a Ferrari, or even tried to get in and out of one. :)
Yes, the Civic UI is significantly better than the Ferrari. The Ferrari, on the other hand, goes faster. A rather uncomfortable, jarring ride, though - feels like if you left the Civic in 1st gear, that jerky ride, and let all the air of the tires so you feel every pebble you drive
Re: waaah waaah (Score:2)
Your first sentence was correct
In fact, in university in ux design, Apple is actually regularly used as an example of poor design
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So using your logic popularity = better UI/UX.
Yes. People tend to use what they like.
Android is better than iOS?
Android is more popular because it is cheaper.
Windows is better than Linux?
The Windows UI/UX is more consistent. Nothing is more frustrating than using someone else's Linux desktop.
Honda Civic is better than Ferrari?
A Honda is certainly easier to use.
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The grandparent said sarcastically that the UI can't be so bad that people have don't use it, all that means if the UI is bad enough people will stop using it, that not mean that the best UI will be the most popular, UI is one of the factors that people choose to use something, not the only one.
Saying that they then must equate best UI to most popular is a straw man argument, it does not address the real issue the googles UIs cannot be that bad.
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What Google is no longer doing is supporting users with free stuff. Google was able to get cookies on users machines because they gave us stiff like mail. We could block 2o7 boy blocking Google meant blocking t
Re: waaah waaah (Score:2)
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I think the obvious problem is that Google's UI/UX has tilted so far towards mobile that it's a huge pain in the behind to use on a desktop, and so many things are hidden and require tapping on. It's like all their help documentation was designed by an AI who gives answers like a C++ programmer, every answer is it's own page with no ability to search because for some darn reason they hide the answers on every page behind the question.
Then there is all the assumed-idiocy in the UI. Like go back and look at
Re:waaah waaah (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, keep this guy away from my Gmail. All these "improvements" and new "design language" have only made the experience consistently worse. Gmail used to be clean, compact, and easy to use. Now it's "simplified" into unusability. I don't want my Gmail UI redesigned the same way I didn't want Firefox to badly ape Chrome: If the UI of these new competitors is to your liking, GO USE THEM! Recognize there may be a reason the rest of us don't!
Re:waaah waaah (Score:4, Insightful)
Does he want shiny eye candy?
This is exactly what he wants. Every time "designers" get involved making it "attractive" in the name of "user experience" is when the product itself goes to shit. They don't understand that the engineers are very smart fucking people who understand the multitude of usecases these products have to serve and they focus on efficient utility first.
Every product I know that's gone for design over utility has flopped. Firefox being the prime example - Firefox 4 was the beginning of the end because it put designers priorities ahead of users.
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On the other hand, even TFA lumps them together as "UI/UX", and complains about "GUI" without once pointing to anything specifically UXy.
Re: waaah waaah (Score:2)
The user interface is part of the user experience. What is your problem?
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So get a nifty client and point it at the mail service. Can have offline local copy/archive that way too.
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Mutt. [wikipedia.org]
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Evolution appears to be Linux only. I play a lot of games and Windows it pretty much a requirement for them to run their best.
Re: waaah waaah (Score:2)
It's you assholes who believe he had a choice, that are the problem.
It's being forced to by e.g. employers or other idiots like you, who make it the dominating thing everyone has to deal with.
I bet you're like "If you don't like Trump, you are Free(TM) to move to another country." too
Also, how unstable is your ego, if you handle criticism *that* badly? Are you still in puberty, or what?
Hint: People can criticise whatever they think is bad. Especially if they don't use it becaise of that. Grow up, and deal w
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Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 2: bury settings behind other settings that nobody ever looks for
and so on.
Re:Agreed (Score:4, Informative)
Step 3: Don't let the people who signed up to use GSuite on their personal domains use any of the new services. Completely ignore them when they request multiple times to either get the services or let them move their purchases to a non-gsuite account. Do this for all of your products, like Youtube TV, Nest, Google Home, etc... Laugh that you told them to use this service years ago, and told them that it was designed for power home users with their own domain.
One of the major suspects is automated A/B testing (Score:5, Informative)
One of the major suspects for creeping shittiness in web interfaces is automated A/B testing. Some metric is chosen as a proxy for how good the UI is, then a robot makes tiny tweaks to the UI until that metric changes to a different number.
You've probably seen one of these big automated A/B design 'successes' if you've browsed without an adblocker for any period of time. The situation where the ad takes just a LITTLE longer to load than the rest of the page, and manages to load at just the wrong time to intercept a click? That's the type of solution you evolve when you automate a ton of tiny little changes to a website. And in terms of the metric they're optimizing for - ad clicks - it works amazingly.
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I don't think the slightly delayed display of ad shifting layout to make a user accidently click the ad is an unintended consequence of those crap sites...
Re:One of the major suspects is automated A/B test (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to fully emulate the web experience on paper, place a page on the table for the test subject to read. To add motivation, offer them some small reward if they can get a particular bit of information from the provided document. At random intervals, suddenly slide the paper towards or away from the subject while they're reading. If it's a multi-page document, wait a few seconds after they start reading page 2 and then flip it back to page one.
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Possibly, but a lot of this does have to do with just stupid design decisions and who makes them. If a pimple-faced tech lead, the drives the google bus and lives with 10 roommates designs the Youtube Music UI, of course it will not have previous and next track buttons in the AndroidTV version of the app because he does not own a TV. Oh yeah, bluetooth will also not work because he doesnt own a car...
One of the hardest things in application design is "putting yourself in your users shoes"...
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Specifics (Score:5, Insightful)
When you make a request for change, it's helpful to say what you don't want and what you do want. Saying it's a cesspool or requires a college course is entertaining and attention-getting, but it's not actionable.
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When you make a request for change, it's helpful to say what you don't want and what you do want. Saying it's a cesspool or requires a college course is entertaining and attention-getting, but it's not actionable.
They're a multi-billion dollar company. They can damn well hire someone to give them actionable advice, if they're somehow unable to find someone already within the organization who understands where they've gone wrong.
And make no mistake, they have gone wrong.
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When you make a request for change, it's helpful to say what you don't want and what you do want. Saying it's a cesspool or requires a college course is entertaining and attention-getting, but it's not actionable.
They're a multi-billion dollar company. They can damn well hire someone to give them actionable advice, if they're somehow unable to find someone already within the organization who understands where they've gone wrong.
And make no mistake, they have gone wrong.
No. Personally I think gmail is the best email experience i've used so the author needs to provide some examples of what he doesn't like. GDocs is trying to compete with MS Office. It's much safer to keep close to the defacto standard for word processing, spreadsheets etc. The average customer just wants an office suite that is similar and compatible to MS and syncs to the cloud. The innovation of gdocs was the cloud part, not the word/spreadsheet processing part. Notion is a completely different app with
Re: Specifics (Score:2)
Of course it it.
It only requires thinking for yourself.
I know... a big taboo among certain types.
How about: Anything but that would be fine.
Or: Try the opposite of that.
Or just: Try less of that.
Criticism highlights a delta from what is expected. That is a vector. Make the vector smaller or turn it around.
Why do I have to tell you such basic human brain stuff?
Reminds me of a joke. (Score:5, Funny)
A guy dies. When he gets to the pearly gates, St. Peter asks him if he wants to go to heaven or hell. He asks what the difference is, and St. Peter replies that in heaven, Apple designs the UI, Google designs the hardware, and Amazon builds the server infrastructure. In hell, Google designs the UI, Amazon designs the hardware, and Apple builds the server infrastructure.
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Re: Reminds me of a joke. (Score:5, Funny)
Apple UI is my definition of hell though.
If Satan was a condescending nanny. A nurse in a nightmare hospital. A dominatrix with a cheerful smile and the most evil eyes possible. A "friendly robot" in a dystopic scifi film.
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It's funny because it's true!
I just wish the old national stereotypes were still true. We could really do with some sane policing now. Although I note the Swiss have not approved the vaccines, calling them "premature", so maybe they really still are the kings of sane organisation.
People value stability and familiarity (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, the only people who care are the "UI Mavens".
Back when Microsoft Office was "evolving" through its various incarnations, each UI change caused incredible havoc - even very UI-savvy people have a hard time finding some popular feature that's now hidden under some obscure ribbon panel. "Ain't nobody got no time for dat!".
The outstanding _feature_ (not _bug_) of the Google Docs UI is how little it has changed over the last 10-15 years. Everyone knows exactly what it can do, and how to make it do that.
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The people who care are *new* users. Anyone can learn any sort of complicated mechanism. And learn it well. How fast you learn it depends on how logical and discoverable the interface is.
This is why the hated ribbon interface in Office isn't actually that bad. And the new Windows 10 start menu wouldn't be that bad if it wasn't full of ads and software I never installed.
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The ribbon interface "isn't that bad" if you put the effort into learning it. The thing about menus is that, if you can read, you can look at a menu and know what's on it in a matter of seconds. Generally speaking, you don't need to actually learn a menu based interface. It explains itself. Obviously if the application has all sorts of functions that you don't know, you will need to learn the functions. But, if you scramble a menu based interface for an application you know and scramble the ribbon equivalen
Re:People value stability and familiarity (Score:4, Informative)
The ribbon is hated because it takes up more space on the screen than a menu system plus 3 rows of toolbar buttons, on average requires more clicks than a row of drop-down menus plus a row of well-chosen toolbars, and changes by context so that what you want to do is hidden just when you want to do it.
And the required actions are not really more discoverable in the ribbon than they are using menus plus toolbars.
So, yes, the hated ribbon interface is actually that bad.
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Back when Microsoft Office was "evolving" through its various incarnations, each UI change caused incredible havoc - even very UI-savvy people have a hard time finding some popular feature that's now hidden under some obscure ribbon panel. "Ain't nobody got no time for dat!".
You have a good point that people tend to 'resist change' (or have a strong aversion to it), but in general it doesn't excuse poor design in the first place (which might be the reasons for those 'incarnations' happening).
There's also the stupid tendency to implement change for the sake of it, usually from some silly (or really, stupid) need to have cyclical updates (*coughApplecough*).
Re:People value stability and familiarity (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, the only people who care are the "UI Mavens".
Back when Microsoft Office was "evolving" through its various incarnations, each UI change caused incredible havoc - even very UI-savvy people have a hard time finding some popular feature that's now hidden under some obscure ribbon panel. "Ain't nobody got no time for dat!".
The outstanding _feature_ (not _bug_) of the Google Docs UI is how little it has changed over the last 10-15 years. Everyone knows exactly what it can do, and how to make it do that.
This really isn't true.
Office incremented on the menus-and-toolbars from the earliest iterations up until 2003. there were additions and tweaks, of course, but menu locations were generally consistent.
Office 2007 was the massive paradigm shift where toolbars and menus merged. I would argue that this was ultimately a good change, but the absence of either existing menus (which OSX has and still has to this day) or the search function that came in 2016, or even the inability to create one's own ribbon tabs that would arrive in 2010 made the change a lot harder than it had to be.
BUT...if you make the jump from 2007 to 2019, the UI has stayed reasonably consistent during that time.
Now, with Docs, yes, Google has kept its UI pretty consistent for the core stuff. It's everything else that keeps shifting around to the point where one tends to need to do how-do-i-do-X searches with a date cutoff because old tutorials reference procedures that no longer apply.
This is the tightrope walk many software developers deal with; Google happens to be relatively visible at it. Incremental UI shifts aren't perceived as being as valuable as massive overhauls. This causes confusion in users, who then have to be taught how to do things all over again, because discoverable UI is also not-valued (Snapchat, I'm looking squarely at you).
There is a mountain of research that was done back in the early to mid 1980s about what UIs people found the easiest to learn and use. For a while, making software that had its functions discoverable and usable was a big deal, in no small part because difficult software didn't sell to a populace that still had analog ways of doing things. Since then, UI that looks pretty seems to be preferable to UI that's functional. That doesn't mean I am advocating for ugly software (DJ Power [malavida.com] comes to mind), but I am saying that letting graphic designers design UIs based purely on design tenets yields software that looks lovely, but makes life difficult.
A good balance helps everyone, but Google isn't a company that comes to mind when I think of things that are balanced.
Microsoft is a worse offender (Score:3)
1. MS is constantly moving settings in Windows with every major feature update.
2. They "HIDE" information that is useful. i.e., Emails in outlook over a week old only show the DATE that the email was received, not the TIME. Why wouldn't I want to know the time after a week?
3. The controls for a given object move if your mouse is hovering over it. i.e., the flag or attachm
Product lifetime (Score:2)
Google's product lifetime goes something like this...
1. Product announced to huge fanfare
2. Product rolls out and immediately gains huge traction
3. Product builds out APIs and cross promotion within the Google Platform
4. Original product loses interest and budget from management
5. Product languishes
6. Product languishes...repeat
20. Google shuts down popular service in spite of wide usage.
Google Is the new Microsoft (Score:3)
Fully agree (Score:5, Interesting)
I have admin access in G-Suite and I fully agree that the interface is disgusting. Mail routing rules happen in two different places. Rule interaction is not clearly documented. "Links" to different parts of the interface are not real links (they're Javascripty bullshit), so you can't easily open different sections in different browser tabs. And overall, the interface is confusing as hell.
I hate Microsoft with a passion, but I have to admit that their O-365 interface is better than Google's.
The two forces at work (Score:2)
I'm not going to RTFA, especially when its just a bliggity, blog. But from the summary I can discern two things.
1.) Google is an effective monopoly, so they aren't beholden to their 'customers'.
2.) At a granular level, corporations are fiefdoms of people. People try to obtain power and wealth within the kingdom, and part of that is hiring 'armies' of people to support your fiefdom. Unfortunately you cannot tell the emperor in the kingdom all-hands, that after raising a legion of PMs and Devs you have no
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But from the summary I can discern two things.
1.) Google is an effective monopoly, so they aren't beholden to their 'customers'.
This is what I find problematic with, in general, "public" companies - their real customers are the shareholders, not the regular users ("consumers") of their products.
In the end, the only thing that really matters to them is pleasing their customers. Consumers are just another tool at their disposal to increase the value for their customers.
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I'm not going to RTFA, especially when its just a bliggity, blog. But from the summary I can discern two things.
1.) Google is an effective monopoly, so they aren't beholden to their 'customers'. 2.) At a granular level, corporations are fiefdoms of people. People try to obtain power and wealth within the kingdom, and part of that is hiring 'armies' of people to support your fiefdom. Unfortunately you cannot tell the emperor in the kingdom all-hands, that after raising a legion of PMs and Devs you have no new gifts to bear this because 'the UI is fine the way it is'. You must present something, which means changing stuff for better or worse.
And as usual it is us serfs who bear the brunt of the politics of the royal court.
The article is complaining about lack of change, not about change.
that's not the worst of it (Score:2)
Yeah, no shit? (Score:2)
Call me when Android gets an undo function.
That alone says everything you need to know.
Or when your finger isn't obscuring precisely the spot you want to pick.
Or when any repetitive task, which is precisely the jobkl you want a computer to do, must not be done manually.
Like a freaking select button (like shift on a PC) to quickly select a set to do a function on. Like a list of check marks or files or articles or whatnot.
You know: Basic freaking comforts that computer UIs offered for decades.
Google is easy to understand. (Score:2)
This! (Score:5, Interesting)
2. How can you be sitting on billions of dollars and be unable to hire product managers that can create usable interfaces?
This. This is what I don't understand.
Same as with Apple with its near total lack of proper documentation, and massive amounts of bugs.... all while sitting on piles of cash, enough to built a $7B+ "spaceship campus", but apparently not enough to do proper QA
You can't tell me none of these companies with massive cash "can't find the resources" to do proper QA/UX - christ with that amount of cash, they could spend a fraction of it to hire a large enough group of people, give them a college-level education/training and then have them do the proper work, and still have plenty left over. Not only would it kickstart those people with a new career, but also benefit users of its products immensely.
Re: (Score:3)
This sounds like a lot of hand-waving to me. What specifically are they missing from their QA process? What specifically is "proper" UX?
As the Agile Manifesto says, "Working software is the primary measure of progress." https://agilemanifesto.org/pri... [agilemanifesto.org] Google's software WORKS, and that's what I care about. A lot of software out there, like Microsoft desktop search does not work. I give Google kudos for that.
Re: (Score:2)
They are not perfect, but they are pretty good, mostly comprehensive, and very usable.
They used to be much better; now they mostly seem for your to rely on keynote/WWDC videos, which are not complete.
They have gotten better at filling in stuff, but there's still many gaps [nooverviewavailable.com] (for example, NSProgress has existed since macOS 10.9, but wasn't documented properly until recently, forcing developers to have to rely on headers to get useful information until now).
Specifically, I remember when they used to provide general "tutorial" style documentation on technologies (NSURLSession comes to mind); but
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly I don't use docs from other projects/comanies (ie. Google, MS) much and haven't needed to figure out the same level of details from them, so I can't really honestly compare. And granted, I was probably a bit harsh on the "docs" front, though that's mostly out of past frustrations when trying to find useful info (ex. the NSProgress class I mentioned), though my initial criticism isn't focused only on the documentation issue.
Still, things could be better, and usually I tend to think of comparing thin
Let me propose this hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
Products that are not under serious competitive pressure never get better. They do often get worse.
The cycle continues (Score:2)
Tiktok is the new Facebook.
Facebook is the new Google.
Google is the new Apple.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Microsoft is the new Oracle.
Oracle is the new IBM.
IBM is the new Xerox.
Don't change things! (Score:5, Interesting)
1) gmail *DID* change interfaces. It was called "Inbox", and everyone FUCKING HATED IT because "OH EM GEEZ different", so they killed it.
2) Microsoft Office drastically changed interfaces between 2003 and 2007, and everyone FUCKING HATED IT because "OH EM GEEZ different", but MS stayed the course and continued to iterate it into something usable.
Same old... (Score:2)
Google's UI/UX design has been plain bad for years, particularly for Gmail and Google Docs, with the excuse that "what do you expect for free stuff?" being used to justify it.
But when Google made the paid GSuite versions available, with exactly the same UI/UX schema, and added apps alongside Docs to make it a more fully featured Office package, it stepped into the arena alongside Microsoft Office (and more recently Office 365), plus a bunch of other productivity and workflow apps that have competing feature
Analytics are for Google, not you. (Score:2)
They listened to feedback (Score:2)
At least with Gmail. I wanted all my mail at a glance, but the menu on the lefthand side was taking up too much space. I suggested a collapsible menu, or at least the list of folders does not have to stay on that annoying fixed width.
With Google Docs, they try so much to be as annoying as MS Word, before the latter's switch to ribbons. Google will get there; it's just a matter of time.
Classic Slashdot, always complaining (Score:2)
Actually wrong problems with google UIs.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google docs actually is fine, being one of the google products that still are. They have not broken it yet like they have others things they have.
Now to the broken ones:
In Youtube, why does it now only fit 6 videos on a side on a 4k projection compared to 10 before in the same space. I really do not need each video thumbnail to be 40cm wide as they are now... and why cannot I change it...
Google search results.. why do I only see 8 results, each result being 25cm high..
Gmail web is only partly broken. That is.. they did make everything take more space but not by a large margin. The biggest problem there is the unneeded extra clicks they have added to things, like in settings you always have to click "see all settings" now, an extra step they added at some point because they hate their users I guess. And luckily you can turn off the stupid "priority mailbox" stuff, though given that it is google I fear that will go away some day and you have to use that abomination.
I do not have a tiny smartphone screen, instead I have a 4k projector.. but I guess Google programmers cannot distinguish between those or allow users to chose.
As for their smartphone apps.. they are mostly broken by not being smartphone usable.. Missing basic features like wrapping of text in chrome, Zooming in most places or only allowing partial zooming.. showing huge things so that a list will only show a few entries so you have to scroll forever.. and such basic things..
The sad fact is that they all used to be better, but they seem to have broken them on purpose.
Overll they seem to want to make their destop Uis be phone UIs and their Phone UIs be desktop and failing at even that.
Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't use any of the Google stuff, not even their search engine, but the points the author makes out are the same ones I've been saying for some time about web interfaces and software in general.
With the billions spent each year, how is it possible to have such shitty interfaces, not to mention usage? Here's a quick example. I wanted to see if stores in my area sold a specific product because I no longer saw it on the shelf. I went to the company's web site and after turning on 10 different scripts, 2 image services and a few other things, I finally got the site to the point where I could put in my ZIP code.
Except even that was completely screwed up. I couldn't put in just my ZIP, I had to select a product first. Only then could I check to see if the product was available in my area. I couldn't say, "Show me everything in my area".
What kind of sadist makes a person jump through so many hoops? How is it possible to be so incompetent that a simple search involves so much?
Adobe has gotten into the game as well. In the past, when you signed into your master account to assign licenses, you saw your software and could get right to it. Now, not only are you harassed every time you log in with needing a security code, you are not presented with your software to choose from. Nope, you have to get rid of the Adobe advertisement screen first.
No way, no how, should a web "developer" be allowed to code a site. The shitstorm that is the web is less usable every day because someone wants to piss on the people to show dominance rather than make it easy for someone to find or do what they need.
No (Score:2)
2. Why do Norton and Quip not look like what we learned over decades for productivity tools should look and act like.
Try publishing products on GCP (Score:2)
So, if you are a software vendor, and want to publish on GCP's marketplace, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to document any and all open source code you use, including ensuring that code under many license types are included in the OS image you are deploying, even when not required by the license. Next, you have to take SCREENSHOTS of where all the license information is on our image, and paste it into a spreadsheet that you submit for open source review. It is the most antiquated process I ha
How about a rant on facepalm? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't use any of the google services except search, and that's become a market tool, and a lousy search tool
Now, facepalm, which I wind up using because too many friends don't read their email... Look, I'm a diehard M$ hater... but their GUIs are *consistent*. Stupid, a lot, and changed for no good reason, but *consistent*.
Facepalm? Start a post, and hit , it gives you a new line, while posts. Oh, except if you're replying to another post, in which case it's the opposite. And the concept that you ALWAYS want to see most recent first is utterly beyond them, so every time after you follow a notification, go back, and hit "most recent" again. And again. And again.
And there's no way to unscroll an entire thread. So, if the notification you're following is *inside* one, 50 or 100 posts down, it never takes you there.
And on, and on....
meanwhile iTunes nervously agrees (Score:2)
i have read through the old school mac UI guidelines, like no surprises and simplicity.... ... then i tried to buy and listen to audiobooks in itunes.
i mean eventually it works. but its kind of hilarious, a 9 hour book has no chapters, its just one massive file with one little bar to click on to skip back and forth through the book. and when you click buy and download you cannot click play, you have to go into some weird menu to 'view your available downloads' and then click play. and then try to figure out
What's wrong with GMail? (Score:2)
I don't see an issue. I use it daily. It lists my mail. I can read it. What's the fucking problem?
Or is this idiot all about "flash" and "pizzazz" and not functionality?
Gmail is easy to "upgrade", use an email client. (Score:3)
I might log into the web interface once a year as I've always disliked it and have used Thunderbird on Linux (and Thunderbird Portable on Windows not least because you can back up software and messages by archiving a copy of the program folder).
If Google kill that option then I'm gone but it's served well so far but that would also kill using Outlook integration.
Simulataneous connections are a major bonus for using an email client, you can reply to messages via other accounts so if any one service is unavailable you can work seamlessly.
Gmail is so useful Google can afford not to care about UI. The typical user (who can't even spell UI and is not a techie) will accept what they're given and likely does most of their comms with a messenger since (non-business) email is considered a Boomer thing today.
What does a good UX pass for these days? (Score:2)
Mobile first?
Jackpot scrolling?
Huge fonts on stock image backgrounds with no useful information?
Data entry forms with one field per row on a widescreen display?
Unusable clutter free interfaces?
Google Analytics is useless anyway (Score:2)
GA is mostly useless because millions of people are now blocking it. Install a local stats package and stop helping creepy stalkers follow everyone around the Internet.
We need a GUI markup standard (Score:2)
For "productivity" applications, what's needed is a GUI markup standard to avoid the bugs, headaches, bloat, and inconsistencies of JS/DOM/CSS. It could be a stand-alone browser and/or an HTML browser pluggin. It should have these features:
1) Interactive GUI markup language, not "static" like XAML.
2) Session based and tie child windows to the session to reduce the need to re-verify credentials per page, unlike the web.
3) Have a coordinate-based placement option so click-able charts, diagrams, and graphs can
Re:We need a GUI markup standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Buttons MUST LOOK LIKE BUTTONS
Input Fields MUST LOOK LIKE INPUT FIELDS
Static Text MUST LOOK LIKE STATIC TEXT
It's not rocket science, it's not even fucking programming.
The user must KNOW BY LOOKING what an element is for.
If not, the UI person has failed in their job.
And no UI designers, putting functionality in a button DOES NOT MEAN it should be removed from a menu. The menu should be comprehensive and Duplication is perfectly okay.
And Right Clicking MUST WORK. EVERYWHERE.
Re: (Score:3)
And don't shove your shitty mobile interface on the desktop users!
Google Podcasts (Score:2)
Youtube Music replaced Google Play Music, and while it's not horrible it's clearly worse.
Good points (Score:3)
After switching to ProtonMail, I've never looked back at GMail because ProtonMail is on every possible metric a better email service.
If I need a hosted drive solution, Next Cloud / Own Cloud, both vastly better then Google Drive.
If I need a search engine, DuckDuckGo, again a better substitute that often gives me more accurate results.
Office software - Libre Office
Analytic - Honestly just roll your own
I can't name one Google service that is better then an alternative.
Image problems. (Score:2)
'[Blender] is Getting Left Behind Due To Horrible UI/UX'
"Horrible"? (Score:2)
The word "horrible" is all you need to know about this article. Anyone who uses that word in a published article is clearly hyperventilating.
The fact is, Google software WORKS. It might not be the slickest (a la Apple) but it works. I'd rather have not-so-polished software that works, than shiny toys that don't do what they need to do.
Lets be honest. (Score:3)
UI has NEVER been Google's strong point. It's all the wiring behind the scenes. That being said. The UI/UX are usable, just not attractive. Kinda like Using Windows 98 notepad as your programming editor. You can do it, it works, and if you have no alternatives you live with it.
Re: (Score:2)
> Huh? Since when have they *ever* innovated anything?
Microsoft Bob [wikipedia.org] or Clippy [wikipedia.org] ? /s
Oh wait, you were looking for good examples. My bad.
it is not like Microsoft would just outright buy [wikipedia.org] most of their "innovations", right? /s
Re: (Score:3)
I guess it's still not as bad as their mobile interface, but last week I fixed something in an unexpected way. I had e-mail through AT&T, and a few years ago they fobbed it off on Yahoo. My mail configuration was based on sending out SMTP to the ISP's port 25.
Late last year I got a message that something about it was going to change, and something now had to be done in a "secure" way. At least I understand about port 25 being kind of really insecure. I tried to figure out what I needed to change, and c