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>This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. Shouldn't this be the opposite? Maybe this is

>This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. Shouldn't this be the opposite? Maybe this is just me but if I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere.

tanilama 6y ago
> I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere The one who made the decision to use GCP would not be the one who would use it actually. If GCP offers a bigger cut than other Cloud providers, loading time would be irrelevant in that optics. Enterprise users are risk averse. Speed is definitely a plus, but they would care more about stability/predictability than anything.
choathedolls 6y ago
Not the opposite, but we're missing the simple fact that enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. There are constantly clients bringing their demands for additional features or major fixes, very rarely are they "please optimize the UI". For consumer facing products, that's not really the case, unless some massive features are missing, they would rather things be snappy as they tend to be extremely distracted at all times so dropping your app/site/whatever is no big deal. During work, what else are you going to do if Cloud UI is slow besides just wait? Go through the entire process of trying to convince management to make a switch because UI is a little clunky? Good luck with that!
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. I've been using logs, bigquery, dataflow, and a smattering of other products pretty regularly for the past few years. Are these products getting "more features"? Hardly. Well, dataflow deprecates minor SDK versions every month, so you have to run twice as fast just to stay in one place. Instead, they have been redesigning the logs interface with fancy animations. And for the longest time ever they removed features from it like streaming logs. Meanwhile the minor stupid things like displaying dates in MM/DD/YYYY format in date pickers, using AM/PM for time? Oh, they stay on. Graphs that work half of the time and you can never know if they are broken, cached, or just don't work? Oh, they stay on. It's Google's systemic organisational failure: they suck at UIs, they don't care, and they couldn't be bothered to maintain features because "oooh, shiny new thing looks better on my resume".
  - tracker1 6y ago
    I don't entirely agree... Material Design is pretty great imho and I like most of their UI choices (for applications that seem to sometimes get priority). I think what this comes down to, is that their best technical minded developers are busy working on tooling, platforms, systems or other lower-level development. Their best design focused developers on public facing applications. This tends to leave the most junior of developers working on internally facing developer UIs. The payloads themselves are irresponsibly large on this application to say the least, and the ability/skill and understanding needed to make it better are probably not within the team(s) working on this UI to begin with. Personally, I absolutely hate Angular and it's ironic that Angular's chosen primary UI toolkit @angular/material gets roughly half the downloads of the third party material-ui for react. Not even counting boostrap adapters. Most web applications can easily be done in JS with an initial JS payload of ~500k-1mb (download size, compressed), with code splitting can have payloads for different areas/components come up as needed. Charts is probably the biggest beast that is practically impossible to tame, there have been a few times that I just generate the SVG directly in a React component to save the overhead of using a charting library, which is surprisingly easy to do.
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      Material UI is ... well. It just is. It's mediocre at best, and hilariously bad at worst: - Insufficient contrast everywhere https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA - Inconsistent use of their own guidelines: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 (references the old design of the site, but the new one is just as bad) - Bad physical metaphors: https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9 https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9 - Or the hilarious story where they needed a user study involving 600 people to tell them that if a text field doesn't look like a text field, people won't be able to tell it's a text field: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03 https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d... And that's just off the top of my head. But all of that could be forgiven if Google bothered or cared. They don't.
      - 6y ago
- jynelson 6y ago
  This is such a depressing take. "I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!"
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    They're not saying it's ok. They are saying that the overall system (the business-business-management-employee complex) prevents optimization of this UI from being a priority.
  - trhway 6y ago
    >"I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!" that is how enterprise employers treat their employees. The time is wasted everywhere. Slow Google UI is just a one item in the long list, so no one of those enterprise customers would give Google a headache over it.
- sam0x17 6y ago
  I think it's more that people care about the speed of the actual cloud offering, not the internal control panel. The product isn't the control panel, it's the cloud services.
m12k 6y ago
Only if you have a choice. Most people don't have a choice of what tools to use, they are dictated by their employer. And employers may have other priorities (e.g. checking off "serverless" on their bullshit-bingo-card before the next board meeting)
datavirtue 6y ago
Yes
andruby 6y ago
Can you look elsewhere? Most _users_ of Google Cloud are not the decision makers and can't move to, say, AWS. Consumers can more easily make that choice since they're not part of a hierarchy.
blibble 6y ago
they don't care about the opinion of the people using the awful UI, they care about the executives signing the contract after being wined and dined
chrisandchris 6y ago
Tell that to the guys at Atlassian, the worlds slowest web application... The people making the decision aren‘t not often the ones who need to work with the product.
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  At least the new JIRA workflows are faster than the old one...
gnopgnip 6y ago
People who use this product largely don't interact with the web ui, a lot of things are only done occasionally. And the people that use it frequently won't use the web ui, command line tools or a third party program that abstracts that away is more likely. Also the AWS web ui has a lot of the same problems, so switching vendors wouldn't just fix the problem

tanilama 6y ago

> I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere The one who made the decision to use GCP would not be the one who would use it actually. If GCP offers a bigger cut than other Cloud providers, loading time would be irrelevant in that optics. Enterprise users are risk averse. Speed is definitely a plus, but they would care more about stability/predictability than anything.

choathedolls 6y ago

Not the opposite, but we're missing the simple fact that enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. There are constantly clients bringing their demands for additional features or major fixes, very rarely are they "please optimize the UI". For consumer facing products, that's not really the case, unless some massive features are missing, they would rather things be snappy as they tend to be extremely distracted at all times so dropping your app/site/whatever is no big deal. During work, what else are you going to do if Cloud UI is slow besides just wait? Go through the entire process of trying to convince management to make a switch because UI is a little clunky? Good luck with that!

dmitriid 6y ago
> enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. I've been using logs, bigquery, dataflow, and a smattering of other products pretty regularly for the past few years. Are these products getting "more features"? Hardly. Well, dataflow deprecates minor SDK versions every month, so you have to run twice as fast just to stay in one place. Instead, they have been redesigning the logs interface with fancy animations. And for the longest time ever they removed features from it like streaming logs. Meanwhile the minor stupid things like displaying dates in MM/DD/YYYY format in date pickers, using AM/PM for time? Oh, they stay on. Graphs that work half of the time and you can never know if they are broken, cached, or just don't work? Oh, they stay on. It's Google's systemic organisational failure: they suck at UIs, they don't care, and they couldn't be bothered to maintain features because "oooh, shiny new thing looks better on my resume".
- tracker1 6y ago
  I don't entirely agree... Material Design is pretty great imho and I like most of their UI choices (for applications that seem to sometimes get priority). I think what this comes down to, is that their best technical minded developers are busy working on tooling, platforms, systems or other lower-level development. Their best design focused developers on public facing applications. This tends to leave the most junior of developers working on internally facing developer UIs. The payloads themselves are irresponsibly large on this application to say the least, and the ability/skill and understanding needed to make it better are probably not within the team(s) working on this UI to begin with. Personally, I absolutely hate Angular and it's ironic that Angular's chosen primary UI toolkit @angular/material gets roughly half the downloads of the third party material-ui for react. Not even counting boostrap adapters. Most web applications can easily be done in JS with an initial JS payload of ~500k-1mb (download size, compressed), with code splitting can have payloads for different areas/components come up as needed. Charts is probably the biggest beast that is practically impossible to tame, there have been a few times that I just generate the SVG directly in a React component to save the overhead of using a charting library, which is surprisingly easy to do.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    Material UI is ... well. It just is. It's mediocre at best, and hilariously bad at worst: - Insufficient contrast everywhere https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA - Inconsistent use of their own guidelines: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 (references the old design of the site, but the new one is just as bad) - Bad physical metaphors: https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9 https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9 - Or the hilarious story where they needed a user study involving 600 people to tell them that if a text field doesn't look like a text field, people won't be able to tell it's a text field: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-designs-text-fields-603688b3fe03 https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d... And that's just off the top of my head. But all of that could be forgiven if Google bothered or cared. They don't.
    - 6y ago
jynelson 6y ago
This is such a depressing take. "I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!"
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  They're not saying it's ok. They are saying that the overall system (the business-business-management-employee complex) prevents optimization of this UI from being a priority.
- trhway 6y ago
  >"I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!" that is how enterprise employers treat their employees. The time is wasted everywhere. Slow Google UI is just a one item in the long list, so no one of those enterprise customers would give Google a headache over it.
sam0x17 6y ago
I think it's more that people care about the speed of the actual cloud offering, not the internal control panel. The product isn't the control panel, it's the cloud services.

m12k 6y ago

Only if you have a choice. Most people don't have a choice of what tools to use, they are dictated by their employer. And employers may have other priorities (e.g. checking off "serverless" on their bullshit-bingo-card before the next board meeting)

datavirtue 6y ago

Yes

andruby 6y ago

Can you look elsewhere? Most _users_ of Google Cloud are not the decision makers and can't move to, say, AWS. Consumers can more easily make that choice since they're not part of a hierarchy.

blibble 6y ago

they don't care about the opinion of the people using the awful UI, they care about the executives signing the contract after being wined and dined

chrisandchris 6y ago

Tell that to the guys at Atlassian, the worlds slowest web application... The people making the decision aren‘t not often the ones who need to work with the product.

snovv_crash 6y ago
At least the new JIRA workflows are faster than the old one...

gnopgnip 6y ago

People who use this product largely don't interact with the web ui, a lot of things are only done occasionally. And the people that use it frequently won't use the web ui, command line tools or a third party program that abstracts that away is more likely. Also the AWS web ui has a lot of the same problems, so switching vendors wouldn't just fix the problem