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Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. Really bad red

Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. Great developers like this should stay in google forever. Similar thing with paypal's redesign

tspike 6y ago
> just some developers' vanity project I think you underestimate the number of people involved in these kinds of projects.. guarantee there were multiple product managers, a host of UX designers, engineering managers, and devs. It's much harder for a developer to get a thing like this through than a product person.
- srean 6y ago
  A problem is that people have to justify their employment, so they have to do 'something' even if that 'something' does not improve things. The other option they have is to move to another division/project. Moving may not always be an option.
johnnyfaehell 6y ago
> Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is just some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. To be fair, if it was a project to get promoted it wasn't really a vanity project. If it was a vainty project I suspect they wouldn't have quite half way through. > Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. From the looks of it, it's just applying Google's design that is everywhere else to Blogger. While for many people here this isn't needed. But we're for the most part considered advanced users of majority of things we use. This seems like a change that would make it easier for people who aren't that computer savy and are used to gmail and the other Google products and want to start blogging.
lawn 6y ago
It seems these pointless redesigns that only worsen the experience are everywhere. The Reddit one is another perfect example.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  The reddit redesign was far from pointless. It turned the site in to the perfect data extracting, ad showing, engagement boosting site. They redesign was a massive success for reddit the corporation.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    i get plenty of ads using the old site too. How do you know they increased engagement?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      The site is significantly clumsier and more frustrating to use than it once was, thus you have to spend more time on it for the same amount of information, thus "engagement" is increased.
  - bogdanoff_2 6y ago
    They didn't have to do a complete redesign and make the site slow in order to add the features that increased engagement. Both infiniscroll and automatically expanded images were possible with the old reddit by using a browser extension and the site still felt lightweight and kept the same look.
kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
Maintaining legacy UI frameworks is a tech debt for organizations, so there is always a move to migrate to new frameworks.
toyg 6y ago
I doubt this was a “vanity project”. Blogger is ossified: it rarely ever changes significantly, but Google won’t kill it because it still generates significant amount of content on which they get a degree of control. It’s long looked like nobody really wanted to touch it. After all, behind the scenes it was (originally, at least) an awkward static-site generator - it cannot be much fun to hack on. It’s more likely that someone somewhere was told to drag the UI forward for some internal-corporate-governance reason. Blogger had a bunch of features that were clearly built in different “eras” and looked terribly mismatched, they’ve probably realigned some of them too.
josteink 6y ago
> Great developers like this should stay in google forever. Not to promote snark as a primary means of comment here on HN, but this sarcastic little nugget of a sentence really had me chuckling for quite some time.

tspike 6y ago

> just some developers' vanity project I think you underestimate the number of people involved in these kinds of projects.. guarantee there were multiple product managers, a host of UX designers, engineering managers, and devs. It's much harder for a developer to get a thing like this through than a product person.

srean 6y ago
A problem is that people have to justify their employment, so they have to do 'something' even if that 'something' does not improve things. The other option they have is to move to another division/project. Moving may not always be an option.

johnnyfaehell 6y ago

> Ooh yes is so blatantly obvious that this is just some developers' vanity project that he enthusiastically promoted in order to get his own promotion. To be fair, if it was a project to get promoted it wasn't really a vanity project. If it was a vainty project I suspect they wouldn't have quite half way through. > Really bad redesign for no reason at all, ending in a frankenstein solution of mix of old and new interface. From the looks of it, it's just applying Google's design that is everywhere else to Blogger. While for many people here this isn't needed. But we're for the most part considered advanced users of majority of things we use. This seems like a change that would make it easier for people who aren't that computer savy and are used to gmail and the other Google products and want to start blogging.

lawn 6y ago

It seems these pointless redesigns that only worsen the experience are everywhere. The Reddit one is another perfect example.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
The reddit redesign was far from pointless. It turned the site in to the perfect data extracting, ad showing, engagement boosting site. They redesign was a massive success for reddit the corporation.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  i get plenty of ads using the old site too. How do you know they increased engagement?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    The site is significantly clumsier and more frustrating to use than it once was, thus you have to spend more time on it for the same amount of information, thus "engagement" is increased.
- bogdanoff_2 6y ago
  They didn't have to do a complete redesign and make the site slow in order to add the features that increased engagement. Both infiniscroll and automatically expanded images were possible with the old reddit by using a browser extension and the site still felt lightweight and kept the same look.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago

Maintaining legacy UI frameworks is a tech debt for organizations, so there is always a move to migrate to new frameworks.

toyg 6y ago

I doubt this was a “vanity project”. Blogger is ossified: it rarely ever changes significantly, but Google won’t kill it because it still generates significant amount of content on which they get a degree of control. It’s long looked like nobody really wanted to touch it. After all, behind the scenes it was (originally, at least) an awkward static-site generator - it cannot be much fun to hack on. It’s more likely that someone somewhere was told to drag the UI forward for some internal-corporate-governance reason. Blogger had a bunch of features that were clearly built in different “eras” and looked terribly mismatched, they’ve probably realigned some of them too.

josteink 6y ago

> Great developers like this should stay in google forever. Not to promote snark as a primary means of comment here on HN, but this sarcastic little nugget of a sentence really had me chuckling for quite some time.