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Google is getting left behind due to horrible UI/UX

271 points by danielrm26 6y ago

TT3351 6y ago
For about 6 hours a few months ago the Google Keyboard app had plastered the "GOOGLE" logo on the spacebar. Very high impact improvement...
tpmx 6y ago
I think this sudden performance improvement of many services after the outage earlier today is indicative of how Google lost its way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812 It's very hard for me to find a good explanation for why this isn't the normal performance.
wiremine 6y ago
It feels like Google has never really truly cared about UI. They seem to grok UX, but the aesthetics always drift towards the geekier side of user interface design. This isn't to say they don't have lots of user interface designers, or that they don't get branding. It's that they lack a modern creative direction vision that connects those two functions.
draw_down 6y ago
You can't just take a screenshot of a 15-year-old product and note that nobody would put together a UI that way if they were starting from scratch. Of course they wouldn't, they would do something "clean" and "elegant" and "modern" and, above all, "simple". Those buttons are there because they do things that someone somewhere needs or really wants. You know how people here typically praise Microsoft for their backwards compatibility? Yeah, well, old things that don't reinvent themselves grow warts. Old things that do reinvent themselves do so in part to limit themselves from past constraints. No free lunches.
danso 6y ago
This is one of the most content-vacant articles I've seen on HN lately. - "Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX": provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage. - "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?": provides zero screenshots or even textual descriptions of whatever it is these competitors have that Google should just copy. - "How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?" I guess the words "completely" and "obsoleted" have no meaning?
- pcj-github 6y ago
  Yes I'm getting pretty bored of these kinds of posts that offer no real ideas (this was just a rant) in order to drive traffic to their paid newsletter.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    They are meant to be convo openers, and it works. People rejected banner advertising, so advertising adapted
- hyakosm 6y ago
  Today they added a weird "feature" in Google Search : when I hover on some results links, there is a blinking black line and the result description expands from 2 lines to 4 lines, sometimes with adding pictures. I trigger that effect involuntarily and this disturbing thing can't be disabled. Where this idea come from ? Google is more and more cluttered everywhere. I miss the Google search page from 2005. I don't have statistics but I always remember Google pages and UI being fast, simple and straightforward. Time passes and I feel my experience with Google UIs more convoluted.
- babesh 6y ago
  It may be mostly content vacant but I think the content was in the screenshots. The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye. The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.
  - 6y ago
mattkevan 6y ago
Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most changes made things worse. Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search. Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side. Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load. Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs. It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  Google drive nested subfolder is also a mess.
- Lutzb 6y ago
  When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product. It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
  - ogjunkyard 6y ago
    Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).
bkandel 6y ago
I usually think these "Google is the worst" posts are over the top, but I genuinely find Gmail's mobile interface bewildering. There are two three-dot/ellipsis icons when you read an email and after using mobile Gmail for years I have no idea which actions are in which. "Move to Inbox": upper icon. "Add star": lower icon. "Mark important": upper icon. "Mark unread": lower icon. I'm sure there's some explanation or at least mnemonic but I'm lost.
- TerminalWarrior 6y ago
  They are SO over the top. Every single interface is fine. Never have I not been able to figure something out at WORST with a quick Google search. HN has a few reactions that I will never understand. The idea that they are being "tracked" against their will, that Google has bad UI and that Bitcoin is worthless. I just chalk it up to smart people thinking they should be smart about everything.
- _iyig 6y ago
  One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years. If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my migration to Fastmail.
- richardfey 6y ago
  There's three if you count Chrome's one
- jeffbee 6y ago
  That's just a reflection of the data model, which is internally consistent but probably doesn't exist in the minds of all users. The reason "move to [label]" is at the top of the screen is because that action affects the whole thread, not one message in the thread. Star is attached to a message or a thread, so that should be in both menus, but in practice the mobile (iOS) app only lets you star a thread from the threadlist, while desktop web lets you star a thread while reading it. This is inconsistent. Important is again in the thread's menu because it's an attribute of threads, not messages. Read-ness is again an aspect of messages, not threads.
claydavisss 6y ago
I tried reading this article about terrible UI/UX but a giant subscription box obscured the content. Irony.
harha 6y ago
I think it seems more like Google doesn’t care about UX because they don’t prioritize/reward work on a product once it doesn’t grow in user numbers. They do care in the early stages when there’s an opportunity for quick growth (and promotions for those involved)
- fakedang 6y ago
  Doesn't explain the poor UX for its existing / inbuilt apps such as Google, Gmail, Drive, etc.
  - harha 6y ago
    You will have to compare them to their contemporaries, for instance moving from Hotmail and GMX to Gmail was great, not only for the free storage but also for it‘s simple UX. Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      > Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know. I read somewhere that Marissa Meyer was responsible for that feature.
- mekster 6y ago
  It's ok for them to think like machines and never become Apple.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  This is the real answer right here. Any product that doesn't see rapid user growth already has one foot in the graveyard of Killed By Google. That website is a showcase of amazing ideas that needed time and nurture to come to fruition, but were executed like a poor earning Mafioso having a bad week.
thrower123 6y ago
The new version of Gmail is still horrible. Every day, I'll do things too fast, and it will pop alerts because some ajax request or promise hasn't resolved completely. I expected that things would get better eventually, but that has not been the case.
- sitkack 6y ago
  You are holding in wrong. If you bridge the gap between the two ajax requests with your thumb, the entities won't be properly deserialized when the second request is made.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    And don't drop it! Gmail now has a glass back.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  Still don't understand why they killed the much superior inbox product
jariel 6y ago
I'm a B.Eng. + Masters and in 2020 I can't for the life of me figure out how to set ringing and notifications on my Android. Sometimes it rings for email, sometimes not, when I go to the screen to turn on/off it's all greyed out. I can have 'up to N' rings per day for certain things which simply doesn't make sense in most situations (missing sms?). WTF is going on? We are facing 'complexity disasters' all around us and Google is not the only culprit. Hint: your product is completely useless unless you've made it clear and easy to use. We don't care 'what it does' until it is at least that.
- richardfey 6y ago
  I used to be a master at this, then UI changed at least 5 times. I slowly lost grip on it, defeated by wear and tear.
random5634 6y ago
The UI is fine. Seriously folks - get a grip. That said, there is no question that things rot at google. One thing other companies do but google does not - listen to customers just a bit. My favorite is of course, google home can't get gsuite calendars, but I can setup alexa to get them fine (so whatever technical / secuirty argument there might be doesn't really hold). This has been a top request for years? I wouldn't be surprised if it turns into a decade. Zero action. This is just throughout things - they do the 90% solution, and WILL NOT touch the 10% you stub your toes on. If they just would tweak and fix a few things ANNUALLY they'd be very competitive.
- tjlav5 6y ago
  This just popped up in android-police last week: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/07/google-assistant-can-now-access-your-calendar-and-meet-events-from-multiple-accounts/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/07/google-assistant-ca...
  - random5634 6y ago
    The issue is that the biggest evangelists and the CEO's and CFO's and CTO's with paid google accounts (which at that level you want so you can have some confidence in service) can't get their calendars on their home devices. So it's not an issue of multiple accounts, but paid accounts not working. After 8 years of folks asking for this we got https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleassistantforgsuite-betatestapplication/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleassistantforgsuit... How in the world is this so hard? I look forward to checking out the link, it needs to be more than multiple accounts, it needs to support PAID workspaces accounts. I've just been around this again though with google family accounts, I couldn't accept the invite. And it hits you everywhere.
mdwelsh 6y ago
I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces." The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX as much as they like, but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world. Every time Google has tried to make a major UX change -- look at Inbox, for example -- the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real. As a result, the UX tends to evolve in smaller steps, which (of course) results in the final result being more of a hodgepodge than you would get if you just started from scratch. Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. These people know how to design good user experiences and care very much about the end result. But there is the reality of being boxed into design decisions that are difficult to undo without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. That is always an option, but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.
- me551ah 6y ago
  Facebook is exactly in the same boat , but they have redesigned the user interface multiple times over the years. Even after so many years, Facebook still feels current.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Tbh I find the current FB UI to be very user hostile. The current layout seems unnatural. Granted, I don't use FB that often nowadays either.
    - stingraycharles 6y ago
absolutelyrad 6y ago
I'd add that material UI is one of the worst things to come out of Google, and their implementation in GCP, Gmail etc. I absolutely hate it, and it looks cheap. Even Windows 10 interface looks better. Even though Material UI is functional, there is something off about it. Something is weird about it, and I can't tell what. Maybe there's a word for it. It feels/looks cheap, like designed for the lowest common denominator device. Like... at least add a backdrop filter/blur to it, it gives a different feeling. The current flat design feels dead and soul less. The only place where material UI is suitable is Google search. Not Gmail, not GCP and DEFINATELY NOT on stock android.
- ehvatum 6y ago
  I think I can explain. The original google interface was a text box hanging in white space. Mind-blowing. Let's use this as our design language.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    and you really have to thank Slashdot for that one. They really put the pressure on Google to stay lean. It was a backlash at the time against search engines that looked like these: https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/520631248826294272 https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/520631248826294272 This thread from 2001 is also an interesting read: https://slashdot.org/story/01/06/25/1316227/google-plans-an-ipo https://slashdot.org/story/01/06/25/1316227/google-plans-an-...
- richardfey 6y ago
  Someone explained it some years ago. It was about the lack of consistency in shadows and that conveying depth on a virtual sheet of paper does not feel natural
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  It makes every app feel like a toy.
- Andrex 6y ago
  > Even Windows 10 interface looks better. Whoah whoah whoah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. To start with, which part of the Windows 10 UI are you specifically referencing? It's quite the hodgepodge.
anonygler 6y ago
As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets: - Well I think it looks great. - Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means) - We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good. Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence. The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle. If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "This makes them feel unsafe at work." This is modern office equivalent of nuking the opponent in war.
  - titanomachy 6y ago
    Or like comparing a political opponent to Hitler?
    - marknutter 6y ago
      Yep
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      I believe that's different because the shoe fits.
  - marknutter 6y ago
    It is absolute insanity, and a sign of the times.
  - 6y ago
test1235 6y ago
Speaking of horrible UX, how do I close this annoying popup? https://i.imgur.com/GaQDt82.png https://i.imgur.com/GaQDt82.png
- m348e912 6y ago
  Inspect the page with firebug (on chrome) and nuke the object. I wish I had a better answer, sorry.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  If you zoom out then you'll be able to see an X in the upper right hand corner.
johnnujler 6y ago
Tbh, It might just be me, but I am starting to feel that the vanity of Material Design is also starting to fade away. People are moving towards other options. In fact, with so many people in the design space doing great work I think users are starting to realise that the initial craze around the precise/scientific design that Google claimed Material Design to be is not really it. Things can be better than material design, and we are seeing it. Recently with blueprintjs, notion, fluent design, and whatnot things I think have started to change for better. And then there is always apple doing its thing.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Yeah adwords and adsense are terrible too. Whatever happened to simplicity, to occam s razor? Just stop, bring back ugly cgi forms
agytvfr 6y ago
One thing I have always thought is odd, is that a multinational company that has ~billions of users would have a single UI. At Google or Facebook scale, it would seems like having a more localized UI per region would make more sense. It isn't like they don't have the money to do this, and most of the service is behind an API/server-side, so having a different front-end better localized to, say, Arabic users, doesn't seem like it would place an undue burden on them.
0x_rs 6y ago
Google Drive UI makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Even on non-mobile devices obvious actions and behaviours are made impossible. Want to open a new tab for every folder in Drive? Tough luck, you can't use middle click nor "Open in new tab" since it's some poorly made abomination without respect for the user. So you need to go back, but it's a large folder and will never load folders in one go, so you have to scroll down again and spend 5 seconds for the animations to end and load the next dozen elements. Just one of the many things personally annoying me, and it's not limited to it alone but all Google services, they are definitely among the worst I've ever had to deal with when it comes to usability.
- Andrex 6y ago
  On the other hand, maybe I'm so used to Drive that I've adapted to points like that, and trying to get used to Dropbox's web desktop UI (in an effort to de-Google) has been absolutely maddening. Google Drive is so much more straightforward and I can reliably find parts of that app much easier than Dropbox's current UI.
vram22 6y ago
That (bad UI/UX, though I would not call all parts of it bad or horrible) has been the case for quite a while, IMO. And yes, it includes UX.
ihateg00gle 6y ago
Google, stop showing me those annoying privacy boxes each time I open search or youtube in private mode. And don't tell me, you did that because of regulations, because you can easily provide a plugin (or browser option) to disable them all. On YouTube I have to close two dialogs, before I can start watching videos. Very annoying.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  There's only so much they can do without being called out for retaining state in "private mode." It's true that GDPR allows them to store a cookie to indicate that the user declined cookies, but private mode is something else. What kills me is that when I hit the button to go fullscreen in YouTube, the first thing that happens after the transition to fullscreen is a carousel-like overlay of other "related" videos. Uh, OK, Google, why do you think I hit the fullscreen button, anyway? Because I want to watch this one. The monkeys are running the zoo over there.
kerng 6y ago
First time I had to use GSuite I was truly puzzled that this is an enterprise offering. The UI is so unprofessional and confusing - really made me miss Microsoft (which is far away from being excellent).
tschellenbach 6y ago
He didn't even mention the google calendar alerting system
exogeny 6y ago
A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done. You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse. Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail. It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
- mirthflat83 6y ago
  Honestly, Facebook’s UX and UI are great.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    I'm ambivalent about the new layout they've introduced... I call it the 'mobilization' of the desktop web. I'm not overly fond of it, but I guess it eliminates a lot of the dead space that was present at high resolutions (1440p / 2160p). I do like the fact I can have a "dark mode".
mordymoop 6y ago
I remember a period of time when it seemed like Evernote was going surge past all the other cloud-document providers. They seemed to be doing everything right. Then they sputtered out. I still pay for Evernote because ... they're holding a huge amount of my old notes that I don't quite know how to get out. But I never add anything new to Evernote. I could tell a similar story about Notion, though it is newer. While Evernote doesn't give you enough affordances, instead almost forcing you do use its internal search for everything, Notion gives you far too many affordances, leading to a tendency to create monstrous, unusable systems where information goes to die. Also, it is slow. Google Docs, on the other hand, has been a consistent workhorse for both my personal and professional needs ever since its inception. Google Docs does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. In Google Drive, you move a Doc file around the way you would move a file around on your computer. Docs/Drive have never lost data due to a sync issue, or left me confused about where a file went. I like this. I want it to stay this way. As for the UX on the Google Analytics ... yeah, the Facebook Ads interface is also completely opaque. I feel like this class of products is being optimized for something other than the feeling of transparency, and is instead cultivating particular workflows used by power users.
bigtones 6y ago
The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture. The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead. What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.
- discordance 6y ago
  You’re right. Changes to the UX for a billion users is not easy. That’s why Googlers get paid the big bucks. One thing they could do that would be universally good is making their apps light weight. The next billion users, as google refers to them, do not have the latest flagship devices.
  - bigtones 6y ago
    They have done exactly that already. The lightweight versions of all those apps are called the "Go Editions" of all the G-Suite apps, and they're bundled with the Go edition of Android for phones.
Meph504 6y ago
Honestly, I feel that google just stopped caring about most of their consumer software several years ago. Compare googles suite to office 365, and it just doesn't even compare, I use to hate microsoft, but as time has gone on, they have continued to modernize and update and add meaningful features. Where googles UI continues to let their product rot on the vine, add and drop products at a rate that they can't be trusted to build a business workflow around. and good luck getting support, the brilliant idea of having support options locked behind your account login, shows its weakness when your are locked out of an account and realize you have no meaningful way to get help. Basically, I feel like google died, and what we have left is this trash heap.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Just some anecdotal fun, but I was looking into gsuite to separate work on a side-project from my main line of work. The side project wasn’t ramped up enough to really need gsuite but... still, it felt like trying to use a two decades old operating system. Everything is scattered around in these oddly named apps, most I’ve never heard of and they don’t explain themselves. It was awful, I gave up after a couple weeks.
jeffbee 6y ago
The criticism of the Gmail desktop web interface seems insubstantial. There's a screenshot with some boxes drawn over it, but what's actually wrong with it? Ask yourself also whether the desktop web interface of gmail is the most important one, or if its audience has been surpassed by that of the Android or iOS apps.
- 0x53 6y ago
  I think the point of the screenshot was to highlight that there are a lot of buttons, but no labels or any way to know what they do.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    OK, I can kinda see that for the stuff at the top. However, most of the icons at the top correspond to a labeled item in the left sidebar, and each has a tooltip as well. I agree this isn't the best but I do not readily imagine a better way, either. As for the stuff on the message level, left-pointing arrow has meant "reply" since the very first graphical MUA, the star is universal design language across Google properties including Chrome, and the three vertical dots for more actions is very common within and without Google.
abalone 6y ago
This is not a high quality article. It’s more fodder for people to share their views in the comments but the article itself is not really HN caliber. Mostly just saying things suck without much specifics.
metalliqaz 6y ago
The new icons for their apps on Android are terribad. They are all the same colors. Now the photos app icon looks the same as the maps app icon, which causes me to confuse the two when I only give a quick glance. Gmail used to be red, now I have trouble finding it among all their other crap. WTF Google???
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  I group apps by functional area, so this actually hasn't affected me. But I can imagine if you group apps by brand for some reason then it'd be rather difficult to tell them apart!
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    I group apps by frequency of access and it's pretty terrible as it seems like every app icon nowadays is just a logo on a bedsheet.
mikelanza 6y ago
The most fundamental problem at Google, of which bad UX/UI is one symptom, is that product management has no real power there. Engineering has all the power there, and basically does whatever it likes. It takes product management research as "input" for its decisions, but does not share power with product management. Strong, competent product management balances user needs, marketplace conditions (competing and complementary products), and technological factors to create optimal products. What we see from the outside are products that are technologically strong, but suffer from lack of useful user perspective and market awareness. Google will never create new (i.e. post search and AdWords) great products until it undergoes a complete cultural transformation toward a product management-focus.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  So did Engineering change all the icons to look almost identical?
  - mikelanza 6y ago
    No, poor product management from neglected product managers did that. You might not be very excited to design icons as your primary job, either, if you thought your job was to manage the entire product.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      Do we know that's the case, that a product manager did this? Seems odd if they all accidentally designed very similar icons across the products. More likely this was a sweeping design centralisation change. And do we know they were misled about their roles? You might think "manage" means "lead", but it doesn't.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
I feel like I'm living on crazy island but I personally have no problem with Google's UI. Not just because I haven't used better, but I've also used much, much worse. It's functional enough.
crispyambulance 6y ago
> How can you run Gmail on an interface that’s tangibly worse than anything else out there? Like what? > How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups? What startups? It's perfectly fine to critique Google UI/UX as "horrible", but if one going to do that, there needs to some examples of UI/UX which are excellent for those kinds of applications. So, who does noteworthy UI/UX ?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  It's not free, but basically, after you use Fastmail to browse email, Gmail feels geriatric and broken. A loading bar to pull up your email account? Pages of emails? What on earth? Gmail feels today like the web mail on my cPanel hosting felt like when I switched to Gmail.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    Thanks, did not know about Fastmail, admittedly, I've not looked around for a long time. I've been using gmail since the early days. Gmail has been "fine" for my needs, but now that I think about it, the filter and label dialogs have always been a pain in the ass. They've been more or less the same since the beginning, one would think that Google would freshen this stuff up-- but no. Moreover, gmail has become more aggressive about "categorizing" stuff on my behalf. Will check it out. I think a key thing for me will be stability and the ability to transition my shit to another provider if needed.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Biggest thing you need to do if you want to be able to transition in the future: Get your own domain and point it at your mail provider. Then you don't have to change your address when you change providers.
Razengan 6y ago
YouTube is one of the biggest victims ever of UI/UX that has been crippled on purpose. • Picture-on-Picture has been artificially blocked on iOS for years. • Autoplay next video but no auto-repeat, what the fuck? • Weirdass TikTok-wannabe format for short videos that you can't save in your playlists along with other limitations. • Comments have been broken and unmoderated since forever. • Hard to access all your playlists and edit them. • Can't scroll through the comments while viewing the video on desktop, but you can on mobile.
RivieraKid 6y ago
As someone working for a corporation that's in a lot of ways similar to Google, I'm no longer surprised that a big and successful company that's supposed to be full of smart people can be so incompetent.
Silhouette 6y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but as an outsider, it's hard to judge exactly why Google (and other major offenders like Facebook and Apple) have lost the plot in recent years. I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards. And notice that the goose is always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter. This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world. These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.
indymike 6y ago
I can't think of a single Google product, aside Inbox and Google Sheets, where I use it because I like to use it (well, not Inbox anymore). Everything else is either incumbent, utility or free.
pnathan 6y ago
I'll be frank: Google's UX blows most other enterprise suites out of the water. Maybe not as slick as other startsup/apps - but it aligns well with me. The one major thing I'd suggest to Google is to have a better Drive search.
joejohnson 6y ago
If these products all needed to compete for users, maybe google would get left behind. But many of the bad examples mentioned are from Docs and Gmail and things with large networks effects and huge frictional costs for users wishing to switch services, not even mentioning the services that are near monopolies and for which users don’t have many alternatives to.
1970-01-01 6y ago
Google.com however still looks and works almost exactly as it did 20 years ago. I don't know of any other site that has done that. I must give them credit for keeping the flame of simplicity lit and not giving into churning ads on the world's #1 Alexa ranked site.
- redisman 6y ago
  Hah! Their simple landing page is like a lightbulb from an anglerfish when it comes to ads.
coffeeling 6y ago
Google's new icons are literally camouflaged. They have simple shapes, but the color changes break the shapes into indiscriminate masses of stuff. That's exactly what animals and the military do to disguise themselves: They break their own shape and outline so it can't be snap-recognized as being distinct from the environment. Google's new icons do exactly that, except that app icons should be snap-recognizable. Now they're a herd of zebras where you can't tell where one begins and another ends. Someone ran a colorblindness filter on them. Predictably, they looked better because turning everything non-blue into yellow made the shapes more coherent.
jedberg 6y ago
This is the local maxima problem. Any company that relies heavily on A/B testing suffers this problem. I know Netflix had/has this problem. You try out a bunch of changes, and one of them makes a slight uptick in the metric you're tracking. So you implement that change and kill all the other experiments, instead of iterating on the other ideas to see if you can get them to do even better than the current winner. Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. He'd just have it changed, and he happened to have good taste. Johnny Ive tried to do the same, but his taste was hit or miss, so now they have a conglomeration of taste and data made interfaces. Google is 100% data made interfaces. From what I understand, their PMs have no leeway to go against the data. At least at most companies the PM can still make a decision against the data, and as long as they can justify it with user studies or something else they can move ahead. Data can tell us a lot of things, but it can't tell us everything.
- cpeterso 6y ago
  I like your description of this being a local maxima problem. The UX won't escape this maxima with incremental user testing. Users also push back on any changes to existing products' UI. Sometimes the best option is to create a new sibling product with a new UX. > Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. In his book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs", author Ken Kocienda (an early engineer on Safari and the iPhone) claims Apple doesn't do any user testing to make data-driven product design decisions. Apple designers and engineers would create many prototypes and demo them up the VP reporting chain until the best prototypes got to Steve.
  - anderspitman 6y ago
    Creative selection sounds like a perfect name for this phenomenon. GP's comment reminded me of working with genetic algorithms in school. Maintaining enough diversity and avoiding local maxima was a huge part of the process. Added that book to my reading list; thanks.
- jakevoytko 6y ago
sn_master 6y ago
One thing from the article I really wish they fix, is adding labels! I get confused so much nowadays with the icons, and many apps no longer even have an option to expand and show the labels. And all the labels are mono-color too, no more colorful icons that help make them distinguishable.
tekkk 6y ago
And the thing is, Google UI/UX is not all that awful in many ways. Compared to some other corporate websites it looks and functions pretty well. But it could be so much better and which we would expect for a company of Google's caliber. Having no way to do self-reflection to treat this problem is a bad sign that people inside Google are perhaps getting out of touch with what is really going out there. Or that there is enough inertia to block good design changes to pass through. Whatever it is, I would hope they would start stepping out of their own bubbles to actually understand what type of interfaces people like to use. Visit the factories with the machine consoles where there is only simple buttons and easy-to-understand menus for everything. And then try to retrace their path to the current interfaces and think why they have to be like what they are right now. It's like relationships, you probably get attracted at first by the appearance of things but it is when that wears off you get the sense of what the other person really is. With UIs, that novelty can wear off pretty quick if it feels like pulling out teeth to use it (Google Analytics is one horror show).
rdsubhas 6y ago
It's not just horrible UI/UX. Google atleast used to be known for their aggressive focus on engineering performance & latency. Anyone remembers when Google bought the Chromium team, Chrome was first launched, and it was lauded as the fastest and lightest browser? Fast forward today, and Chrome is the epitome of sluggishness, a godzilla of a browser. Gmail? Same – horrible, bloated, slow. Google G-Suite? Same. Android? Symbol of inefficiency, barely usable after throwing tens of gigs of RAM, CPU and huge batteries. Google Cloud Console? Piles of steaming slow foam. It's almost as if, show me a product that Google does that is fast today, other than the bare minimum Google home page search box. On one hand, they're facing erosion of product management. On the other hand, it's no longer an Engineering-driven company in the sense their engineering is not able to drive atleast that UI/UX to work performant.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
pretty ridiculous short sighted article. "Materialize or whatever". C'mon. If you don't know anything about it shut up. Material did huge things for usability and uniformity across the google landscape. Over on Analytics, you're not reading stuff and clicking upgrade/migrate whatever and then complaining. Lame man. Yeah, it's complicated, maybe too much for casual users like yourself but it's also complicated for power users who are doing all sorts of things at different levels with it. And this idea that EOL-ing products that everyone on here complains about every single week is all based on magical speculation that it affects 'large swathes of people... perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions'. You're in a bubble man, not that many ppl were affected by Reader shutdown. Inbox. Etc. The Inbox features made their way into Gmail as the one Googler describes features evolve in smaller steps. And everyone moved on from Reader but RSS never died as a tech anyways so geezus, follow some twitter streams or sign up to some newsletters and get with it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tonymet 6y ago
For a given app (mail, notes, storage, OS) compare the google experience with the apple experience. Google has a long way to go.
fomine3 6y ago
I'm frustrating every time when I open a Map from Google Search. It opens weirdly feature-reduced version map and there's no link to open full Google Maps.
Desian 6y ago
Thank God that Google don't get design right. Can you imagine the evil that will come out of good designed google services? I like it that way. Keep it crappy google. I use other products already and feed your algos crap with pleasure.:)

271 points by danielrm26 6y ago

For about 6 hours a few months ago the Google Keyboard app had plastered the "GOOGLE" logo on the spacebar. Very high impact improvement...

tpmx 6y ago

I think this sudden performance improvement of many services after the outage earlier today is indicative of how Google lost its way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812 It's very hard for me to find a good explanation for why this isn't the normal performance.

wiremine 6y ago

It feels like Google has never really truly cared about UI. They seem to grok UX, but the aesthetics always drift towards the geekier side of user interface design. This isn't to say they don't have lots of user interface designers, or that they don't get branding. It's that they lack a modern creative direction vision that connects those two functions.

draw_down 6y ago

You can't just take a screenshot of a 15-year-old product and note that nobody would put together a UI that way if they were starting from scratch. Of course they wouldn't, they would do something "clean" and "elegant" and "modern" and, above all, "simple". Those buttons are there because they do things that someone somewhere needs or really wants. You know how people here typically praise Microsoft for their backwards compatibility? Yeah, well, old things that don't reinvent themselves grow warts. Old things that do reinvent themselves do so in part to limit themselves from past constraints. No free lunches.

danso 6y ago

This is one of the most content-vacant articles I've seen on HN lately. - "Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX": provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage. - "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?": provides zero screenshots or even textual descriptions of whatever it is these competitors have that Google should just copy. - "How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?" I guess the words "completely" and "obsoleted" have no meaning?

pcj-github 6y ago
Yes I'm getting pretty bored of these kinds of posts that offer no real ideas (this was just a rant) in order to drive traffic to their paid newsletter.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  They are meant to be convo openers, and it works. People rejected banner advertising, so advertising adapted
hyakosm 6y ago
Today they added a weird "feature" in Google Search : when I hover on some results links, there is a blinking black line and the result description expands from 2 lines to 4 lines, sometimes with adding pictures. I trigger that effect involuntarily and this disturbing thing can't be disabled. Where this idea come from ? Google is more and more cluttered everywhere. I miss the Google search page from 2005. I don't have statistics but I always remember Google pages and UI being fast, simple and straightforward. Time passes and I feel my experience with Google UIs more convoluted.
babesh 6y ago
It may be mostly content vacant but I think the content was in the screenshots. The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye. The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.
- 6y ago

mattkevan 6y ago

Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade. Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most changes made things worse. Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search. Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side. Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load. Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs. It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.

barkingcat 6y ago
Google drive nested subfolder is also a mess.
Lutzb 6y ago
When Google Mail was invite only, it was a revelation of what a web mail client could be. Fast, forward thinking in the way mails were presented. Then it became a monstrosity that I can no longer recommend to anyone. Suddenly Google Inbox came along. Fast, simple, focused packed with useful new features like mail grouping and content extraction. And it was killed off after roughly two years without any of the features being migrated to another product. It seems like Google became unable to innovate in the basic services they once revolutionized.
- ogjunkyard 6y ago
  Google Inbox was so good. I was honestly shocked that they got rid of what felt like true innovation in the email space (at the time).

bkandel 6y ago

I usually think these "Google is the worst" posts are over the top, but I genuinely find Gmail's mobile interface bewildering. There are two three-dot/ellipsis icons when you read an email and after using mobile Gmail for years I have no idea which actions are in which. "Move to Inbox": upper icon. "Add star": lower icon. "Mark important": upper icon. "Mark unread": lower icon. I'm sure there's some explanation or at least mnemonic but I'm lost.

TerminalWarrior 6y ago
They are SO over the top. Every single interface is fine. Never have I not been able to figure something out at WORST with a quick Google search. HN has a few reactions that I will never understand. The idea that they are being "tracked" against their will, that Google has bad UI and that Bitcoin is worthless. I just chalk it up to smart people thinking they should be smart about everything.
_iyig 6y ago
One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years. If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my migration to Fastmail.
richardfey 6y ago
There's three if you count Chrome's one
jeffbee 6y ago
That's just a reflection of the data model, which is internally consistent but probably doesn't exist in the minds of all users. The reason "move to [label]" is at the top of the screen is because that action affects the whole thread, not one message in the thread. Star is attached to a message or a thread, so that should be in both menus, but in practice the mobile (iOS) app only lets you star a thread from the threadlist, while desktop web lets you star a thread while reading it. This is inconsistent. Important is again in the thread's menu because it's an attribute of threads, not messages. Read-ness is again an aspect of messages, not threads.

claydavisss 6y ago

I tried reading this article about terrible UI/UX but a giant subscription box obscured the content. Irony.

harha 6y ago

I think it seems more like Google doesn’t care about UX because they don’t prioritize/reward work on a product once it doesn’t grow in user numbers. They do care in the early stages when there’s an opportunity for quick growth (and promotions for those involved)

fakedang 6y ago
Doesn't explain the poor UX for its existing / inbuilt apps such as Google, Gmail, Drive, etc.
- harha 6y ago
  You will have to compare them to their contemporaries, for instance moving from Hotmail and GMX to Gmail was great, not only for the free storage but also for it‘s simple UX. Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    > Ironically the lack of display advertising and advertorials was one of the greatest features, little did we all know. I read somewhere that Marissa Meyer was responsible for that feature.
mekster 6y ago
It's ok for them to think like machines and never become Apple.
cbozeman 6y ago
This is the real answer right here. Any product that doesn't see rapid user growth already has one foot in the graveyard of Killed By Google. That website is a showcase of amazing ideas that needed time and nurture to come to fruition, but were executed like a poor earning Mafioso having a bad week.

thrower123 6y ago

The new version of Gmail is still horrible. Every day, I'll do things too fast, and it will pop alerts because some ajax request or promise hasn't resolved completely. I expected that things would get better eventually, but that has not been the case.

sitkack 6y ago
You are holding in wrong. If you bridge the gap between the two ajax requests with your thumb, the entities won't be properly deserialized when the second request is made.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  And don't drop it! Gmail now has a glass back.
kyriakos 6y ago
Still don't understand why they killed the much superior inbox product

jariel 6y ago

I'm a B.Eng. + Masters and in 2020 I can't for the life of me figure out how to set ringing and notifications on my Android. Sometimes it rings for email, sometimes not, when I go to the screen to turn on/off it's all greyed out. I can have 'up to N' rings per day for certain things which simply doesn't make sense in most situations (missing sms?). WTF is going on? We are facing 'complexity disasters' all around us and Google is not the only culprit. Hint: your product is completely useless unless you've made it clear and easy to use. We don't care 'what it does' until it is at least that.

richardfey 6y ago
I used to be a master at this, then UI changed at least 5 times. I slowly lost grip on it, defeated by wear and tear.

random5634 6y ago

The UI is fine. Seriously folks - get a grip. That said, there is no question that things rot at google. One thing other companies do but google does not - listen to customers just a bit. My favorite is of course, google home can't get gsuite calendars, but I can setup alexa to get them fine (so whatever technical / secuirty argument there might be doesn't really hold). This has been a top request for years? I wouldn't be surprised if it turns into a decade. Zero action. This is just throughout things - they do the 90% solution, and WILL NOT touch the 10% you stub your toes on. If they just would tweak and fix a few things ANNUALLY they'd be very competitive.

tjlav5 6y ago
This just popped up in android-police last week: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/07/google-assistant-can-now-access-your-calendar-and-meet-events-from-multiple-accounts/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/07/google-assistant-ca...
- random5634 6y ago
  The issue is that the biggest evangelists and the CEO's and CFO's and CTO's with paid google accounts (which at that level you want so you can have some confidence in service) can't get their calendars on their home devices. So it's not an issue of multiple accounts, but paid accounts not working. After 8 years of folks asking for this we got https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleassistantforgsuite-betatestapplication/ https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googleassistantforgsuit... How in the world is this so hard? I look forward to checking out the link, it needs to be more than multiple accounts, it needs to support PAID workspaces accounts. I've just been around this again though with google family accounts, I couldn't accept the invite. And it hits you everywhere.

mdwelsh 6y ago

I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces." The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX as much as they like, but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world. Every time Google has tried to make a major UX change -- look at Inbox, for example -- the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real. As a result, the UX tends to evolve in smaller steps, which (of course) results in the final result being more of a hodgepodge than you would get if you just started from scratch. Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. These people know how to design good user experiences and care very much about the end result. But there is the reality of being boxed into design decisions that are difficult to undo without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. That is always an option, but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.

me551ah 6y ago
Facebook is exactly in the same boat , but they have redesigned the user interface multiple times over the years. Even after so many years, Facebook still feels current.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Tbh I find the current FB UI to be very user hostile. The current layout seems unnatural. Granted, I don't use FB that often nowadays either.
  - stingraycharles 6y ago

absolutelyrad 6y ago

I'd add that material UI is one of the worst things to come out of Google, and their implementation in GCP, Gmail etc. I absolutely hate it, and it looks cheap. Even Windows 10 interface looks better. Even though Material UI is functional, there is something off about it. Something is weird about it, and I can't tell what. Maybe there's a word for it. It feels/looks cheap, like designed for the lowest common denominator device. Like... at least add a backdrop filter/blur to it, it gives a different feeling. The current flat design feels dead and soul less. The only place where material UI is suitable is Google search. Not Gmail, not GCP and DEFINATELY NOT on stock android.

ehvatum 6y ago
I think I can explain. The original google interface was a text box hanging in white space. Mind-blowing. Let's use this as our design language.
- deckard1 6y ago
  and you really have to thank Slashdot for that one. They really put the pressure on Google to stay lean. It was a backlash at the time against search engines that looked like these: https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/520631248826294272 https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/520631248826294272 This thread from 2001 is also an interesting read: https://slashdot.org/story/01/06/25/1316227/google-plans-an-ipo https://slashdot.org/story/01/06/25/1316227/google-plans-an-...
richardfey 6y ago
Someone explained it some years ago. It was about the lack of consistency in shadows and that conveying depth on a virtual sheet of paper does not feel natural
camjohnson26 6y ago
It makes every app feel like a toy.
Andrex 6y ago
> Even Windows 10 interface looks better. Whoah whoah whoah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. To start with, which part of the Windows 10 UI are you specifically referencing? It's quite the hodgepodge.

anonygler 6y ago

As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets: - Well I think it looks great. - Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means) - We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good. Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence. The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle. If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."

inglor_cz 6y ago
"This makes them feel unsafe at work." This is modern office equivalent of nuking the opponent in war.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  Or like comparing a political opponent to Hitler?
  - marknutter 6y ago
    Yep
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I believe that's different because the shoe fits.
- marknutter 6y ago
  It is absolute insanity, and a sign of the times.
- 6y ago

test1235 6y ago

Speaking of horrible UX, how do I close this annoying popup? https://i.imgur.com/GaQDt82.png https://i.imgur.com/GaQDt82.png

m348e912 6y ago
Inspect the page with firebug (on chrome) and nuke the object. I wish I had a better answer, sorry.
ALittleLight 6y ago
If you zoom out then you'll be able to see an X in the upper right hand corner.

johnnujler 6y ago

Tbh, It might just be me, but I am starting to feel that the vanity of Material Design is also starting to fade away. People are moving towards other options. In fact, with so many people in the design space doing great work I think users are starting to realise that the initial craze around the precise/scientific design that Google claimed Material Design to be is not really it. Things can be better than material design, and we are seeing it. Recently with blueprintjs, notion, fluent design, and whatnot things I think have started to change for better. And then there is always apple doing its thing.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Yeah adwords and adsense are terrible too. Whatever happened to simplicity, to occam s razor? Just stop, bring back ugly cgi forms

agytvfr 6y ago

One thing I have always thought is odd, is that a multinational company that has ~billions of users would have a single UI. At Google or Facebook scale, it would seems like having a more localized UI per region would make more sense. It isn't like they don't have the money to do this, and most of the service is behind an API/server-side, so having a different front-end better localized to, say, Arabic users, doesn't seem like it would place an undue burden on them.

0x_rs 6y ago

Google Drive UI makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Even on non-mobile devices obvious actions and behaviours are made impossible. Want to open a new tab for every folder in Drive? Tough luck, you can't use middle click nor "Open in new tab" since it's some poorly made abomination without respect for the user. So you need to go back, but it's a large folder and will never load folders in one go, so you have to scroll down again and spend 5 seconds for the animations to end and load the next dozen elements. Just one of the many things personally annoying me, and it's not limited to it alone but all Google services, they are definitely among the worst I've ever had to deal with when it comes to usability.

Andrex 6y ago
On the other hand, maybe I'm so used to Drive that I've adapted to points like that, and trying to get used to Dropbox's web desktop UI (in an effort to de-Google) has been absolutely maddening. Google Drive is so much more straightforward and I can reliably find parts of that app much easier than Dropbox's current UI.

vram22 6y ago

That (bad UI/UX, though I would not call all parts of it bad or horrible) has been the case for quite a while, IMO. And yes, it includes UX.

ihateg00gle 6y ago

Google, stop showing me those annoying privacy boxes each time I open search or youtube in private mode. And don't tell me, you did that because of regulations, because you can easily provide a plugin (or browser option) to disable them all. On YouTube I have to close two dialogs, before I can start watching videos. Very annoying.

CamperBob2 6y ago
There's only so much they can do without being called out for retaining state in "private mode." It's true that GDPR allows them to store a cookie to indicate that the user declined cookies, but private mode is something else. What kills me is that when I hit the button to go fullscreen in YouTube, the first thing that happens after the transition to fullscreen is a carousel-like overlay of other "related" videos. Uh, OK, Google, why do you think I hit the fullscreen button, anyway? Because I want to watch this one. The monkeys are running the zoo over there.

kerng 6y ago

First time I had to use GSuite I was truly puzzled that this is an enterprise offering. The UI is so unprofessional and confusing - really made me miss Microsoft (which is far away from being excellent).

tschellenbach 6y ago

He didn't even mention the google calendar alerting system

exogeny 6y ago

A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done. You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse. Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail. It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

mirthflat83 6y ago
Honestly, Facebook’s UX and UI are great.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I'm ambivalent about the new layout they've introduced... I call it the 'mobilization' of the desktop web. I'm not overly fond of it, but I guess it eliminates a lot of the dead space that was present at high resolutions (1440p / 2160p). I do like the fact I can have a "dark mode".

mordymoop 6y ago

I remember a period of time when it seemed like Evernote was going surge past all the other cloud-document providers. They seemed to be doing everything right. Then they sputtered out. I still pay for Evernote because ... they're holding a huge amount of my old notes that I don't quite know how to get out. But I never add anything new to Evernote. I could tell a similar story about Notion, though it is newer. While Evernote doesn't give you enough affordances, instead almost forcing you do use its internal search for everything, Notion gives you far too many affordances, leading to a tendency to create monstrous, unusable systems where information goes to die. Also, it is slow. Google Docs, on the other hand, has been a consistent workhorse for both my personal and professional needs ever since its inception. Google Docs does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. In Google Drive, you move a Doc file around the way you would move a file around on your computer. Docs/Drive have never lost data due to a sync issue, or left me confused about where a file went. I like this. I want it to stay this way. As for the UX on the Google Analytics ... yeah, the Facebook Ads interface is also completely opaque. I feel like this class of products is being optimized for something other than the feeling of transparency, and is instead cultivating particular workflows used by power users.

bigtones 6y ago

The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture. The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead. What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.

discordance 6y ago
You’re right. Changes to the UX for a billion users is not easy. That’s why Googlers get paid the big bucks. One thing they could do that would be universally good is making their apps light weight. The next billion users, as google refers to them, do not have the latest flagship devices.
- bigtones 6y ago
  They have done exactly that already. The lightweight versions of all those apps are called the "Go Editions" of all the G-Suite apps, and they're bundled with the Go edition of Android for phones.

Meph504 6y ago

Honestly, I feel that google just stopped caring about most of their consumer software several years ago. Compare googles suite to office 365, and it just doesn't even compare, I use to hate microsoft, but as time has gone on, they have continued to modernize and update and add meaningful features. Where googles UI continues to let their product rot on the vine, add and drop products at a rate that they can't be trusted to build a business workflow around. and good luck getting support, the brilliant idea of having support options locked behind your account login, shows its weakness when your are locked out of an account and realize you have no meaningful way to get help. Basically, I feel like google died, and what we have left is this trash heap.

corytheboyd 6y ago

Just some anecdotal fun, but I was looking into gsuite to separate work on a side-project from my main line of work. The side project wasn’t ramped up enough to really need gsuite but... still, it felt like trying to use a two decades old operating system. Everything is scattered around in these oddly named apps, most I’ve never heard of and they don’t explain themselves. It was awful, I gave up after a couple weeks.

jeffbee 6y ago

The criticism of the Gmail desktop web interface seems insubstantial. There's a screenshot with some boxes drawn over it, but what's actually wrong with it? Ask yourself also whether the desktop web interface of gmail is the most important one, or if its audience has been surpassed by that of the Android or iOS apps.

0x53 6y ago
I think the point of the screenshot was to highlight that there are a lot of buttons, but no labels or any way to know what they do.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  OK, I can kinda see that for the stuff at the top. However, most of the icons at the top correspond to a labeled item in the left sidebar, and each has a tooltip as well. I agree this isn't the best but I do not readily imagine a better way, either. As for the stuff on the message level, left-pointing arrow has meant "reply" since the very first graphical MUA, the star is universal design language across Google properties including Chrome, and the three vertical dots for more actions is very common within and without Google.

abalone 6y ago

This is not a high quality article. It’s more fodder for people to share their views in the comments but the article itself is not really HN caliber. Mostly just saying things suck without much specifics.

metalliqaz 6y ago

The new icons for their apps on Android are terribad. They are all the same colors. Now the photos app icon looks the same as the maps app icon, which causes me to confuse the two when I only give a quick glance. Gmail used to be red, now I have trouble finding it among all their other crap. WTF Google???

robertlagrant 6y ago
I group apps by functional area, so this actually hasn't affected me. But I can imagine if you group apps by brand for some reason then it'd be rather difficult to tell them apart!
- andromeduck 6y ago
  I group apps by frequency of access and it's pretty terrible as it seems like every app icon nowadays is just a logo on a bedsheet.

mikelanza 6y ago

The most fundamental problem at Google, of which bad UX/UI is one symptom, is that product management has no real power there. Engineering has all the power there, and basically does whatever it likes. It takes product management research as "input" for its decisions, but does not share power with product management. Strong, competent product management balances user needs, marketplace conditions (competing and complementary products), and technological factors to create optimal products. What we see from the outside are products that are technologically strong, but suffer from lack of useful user perspective and market awareness. Google will never create new (i.e. post search and AdWords) great products until it undergoes a complete cultural transformation toward a product management-focus.

robertlagrant 6y ago
So did Engineering change all the icons to look almost identical?
- mikelanza 6y ago
  No, poor product management from neglected product managers did that. You might not be very excited to design icons as your primary job, either, if you thought your job was to manage the entire product.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    Do we know that's the case, that a product manager did this? Seems odd if they all accidentally designed very similar icons across the products. More likely this was a sweeping design centralisation change. And do we know they were misled about their roles? You might think "manage" means "lead", but it doesn't.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

I feel like I'm living on crazy island but I personally have no problem with Google's UI. Not just because I haven't used better, but I've also used much, much worse. It's functional enough.

crispyambulance 6y ago

> How can you run Gmail on an interface that’s tangibly worse than anything else out there? Like what? > How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups? What startups? It's perfectly fine to critique Google UI/UX as "horrible", but if one going to do that, there needs to some examples of UI/UX which are excellent for those kinds of applications. So, who does noteworthy UI/UX ?

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
It's not free, but basically, after you use Fastmail to browse email, Gmail feels geriatric and broken. A loading bar to pull up your email account? Pages of emails? What on earth? Gmail feels today like the web mail on my cPanel hosting felt like when I switched to Gmail.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  Thanks, did not know about Fastmail, admittedly, I've not looked around for a long time. I've been using gmail since the early days. Gmail has been "fine" for my needs, but now that I think about it, the filter and label dialogs have always been a pain in the ass. They've been more or less the same since the beginning, one would think that Google would freshen this stuff up-- but no. Moreover, gmail has become more aggressive about "categorizing" stuff on my behalf. Will check it out. I think a key thing for me will be stability and the ability to transition my shit to another provider if needed.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Biggest thing you need to do if you want to be able to transition in the future: Get your own domain and point it at your mail provider. Then you don't have to change your address when you change providers.

Razengan 6y ago

YouTube is one of the biggest victims ever of UI/UX that has been crippled on purpose. • Picture-on-Picture has been artificially blocked on iOS for years. • Autoplay next video but no auto-repeat, what the fuck? • Weirdass TikTok-wannabe format for short videos that you can't save in your playlists along with other limitations. • Comments have been broken and unmoderated since forever. • Hard to access all your playlists and edit them. • Can't scroll through the comments while viewing the video on desktop, but you can on mobile.

RivieraKid 6y ago

As someone working for a corporation that's in a lot of ways similar to Google, I'm no longer surprised that a big and successful company that's supposed to be full of smart people can be so incompetent.

Silhouette 6y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but as an outsider, it's hard to judge exactly why Google (and other major offenders like Facebook and Apple) have lost the plot in recent years. I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards. And notice that the goose is always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter. This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world. These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.

indymike 6y ago

I can't think of a single Google product, aside Inbox and Google Sheets, where I use it because I like to use it (well, not Inbox anymore). Everything else is either incumbent, utility or free.

pnathan 6y ago

I'll be frank: Google's UX blows most other enterprise suites out of the water. Maybe not as slick as other startsup/apps - but it aligns well with me. The one major thing I'd suggest to Google is to have a better Drive search.

joejohnson 6y ago

If these products all needed to compete for users, maybe google would get left behind. But many of the bad examples mentioned are from Docs and Gmail and things with large networks effects and huge frictional costs for users wishing to switch services, not even mentioning the services that are near monopolies and for which users don’t have many alternatives to.

1970-01-01 6y ago

Google.com however still looks and works almost exactly as it did 20 years ago. I don't know of any other site that has done that. I must give them credit for keeping the flame of simplicity lit and not giving into churning ads on the world's #1 Alexa ranked site.

redisman 6y ago
Hah! Their simple landing page is like a lightbulb from an anglerfish when it comes to ads.

coffeeling 6y ago

Google's new icons are literally camouflaged. They have simple shapes, but the color changes break the shapes into indiscriminate masses of stuff. That's exactly what animals and the military do to disguise themselves: They break their own shape and outline so it can't be snap-recognized as being distinct from the environment. Google's new icons do exactly that, except that app icons should be snap-recognizable. Now they're a herd of zebras where you can't tell where one begins and another ends. Someone ran a colorblindness filter on them. Predictably, they looked better because turning everything non-blue into yellow made the shapes more coherent.

jedberg 6y ago

This is the local maxima problem. Any company that relies heavily on A/B testing suffers this problem. I know Netflix had/has this problem. You try out a bunch of changes, and one of them makes a slight uptick in the metric you're tracking. So you implement that change and kill all the other experiments, instead of iterating on the other ideas to see if you can get them to do even better than the current winner. Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. He'd just have it changed, and he happened to have good taste. Johnny Ive tried to do the same, but his taste was hit or miss, so now they have a conglomeration of taste and data made interfaces. Google is 100% data made interfaces. From what I understand, their PMs have no leeway to go against the data. At least at most companies the PM can still make a decision against the data, and as long as they can justify it with user studies or something else they can move ahead. Data can tell us a lot of things, but it can't tell us everything.

cpeterso 6y ago
I like your description of this being a local maxima problem. The UX won't escape this maxima with incremental user testing. Users also push back on any changes to existing products' UI. Sometimes the best option is to create a new sibling product with a new UX. > Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. In his book "Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs", author Ken Kocienda (an early engineer on Safari and the iPhone) claims Apple doesn't do any user testing to make data-driven product design decisions. Apple designers and engineers would create many prototypes and demo them up the VP reporting chain until the best prototypes got to Steve.
- anderspitman 6y ago
  Creative selection sounds like a perfect name for this phenomenon. GP's comment reminded me of working with genetic algorithms in school. Maintaining enough diversity and avoiding local maxima was a huge part of the process. Added that book to my reading list; thanks.
jakevoytko 6y ago

sn_master 6y ago

One thing from the article I really wish they fix, is adding labels! I get confused so much nowadays with the icons, and many apps no longer even have an option to expand and show the labels. And all the labels are mono-color too, no more colorful icons that help make them distinguishable.

tekkk 6y ago

And the thing is, Google UI/UX is not all that awful in many ways. Compared to some other corporate websites it looks and functions pretty well. But it could be so much better and which we would expect for a company of Google's caliber. Having no way to do self-reflection to treat this problem is a bad sign that people inside Google are perhaps getting out of touch with what is really going out there. Or that there is enough inertia to block good design changes to pass through. Whatever it is, I would hope they would start stepping out of their own bubbles to actually understand what type of interfaces people like to use. Visit the factories with the machine consoles where there is only simple buttons and easy-to-understand menus for everything. And then try to retrace their path to the current interfaces and think why they have to be like what they are right now. It's like relationships, you probably get attracted at first by the appearance of things but it is when that wears off you get the sense of what the other person really is. With UIs, that novelty can wear off pretty quick if it feels like pulling out teeth to use it (Google Analytics is one horror show).

rdsubhas 6y ago

It's not just horrible UI/UX. Google atleast used to be known for their aggressive focus on engineering performance & latency. Anyone remembers when Google bought the Chromium team, Chrome was first launched, and it was lauded as the fastest and lightest browser? Fast forward today, and Chrome is the epitome of sluggishness, a godzilla of a browser. Gmail? Same – horrible, bloated, slow. Google G-Suite? Same. Android? Symbol of inefficiency, barely usable after throwing tens of gigs of RAM, CPU and huge batteries. Google Cloud Console? Piles of steaming slow foam. It's almost as if, show me a product that Google does that is fast today, other than the bare minimum Google home page search box. On one hand, they're facing erosion of product management. On the other hand, it's no longer an Engineering-driven company in the sense their engineering is not able to drive atleast that UI/UX to work performant.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

pretty ridiculous short sighted article. "Materialize or whatever". C'mon. If you don't know anything about it shut up. Material did huge things for usability and uniformity across the google landscape. Over on Analytics, you're not reading stuff and clicking upgrade/migrate whatever and then complaining. Lame man. Yeah, it's complicated, maybe too much for casual users like yourself but it's also complicated for power users who are doing all sorts of things at different levels with it. And this idea that EOL-ing products that everyone on here complains about every single week is all based on magical speculation that it affects 'large swathes of people... perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions'. You're in a bubble man, not that many ppl were affected by Reader shutdown. Inbox. Etc. The Inbox features made their way into Gmail as the one Googler describes features evolve in smaller steps. And everyone moved on from Reader but RSS never died as a tech anyways so geezus, follow some twitter streams or sign up to some newsletters and get with it.

deleted 6y ago

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tonymet 6y ago

For a given app (mail, notes, storage, OS) compare the google experience with the apple experience. Google has a long way to go.

fomine3 6y ago

I'm frustrating every time when I open a Map from Google Search. It opens weirdly feature-reduced version map and there's no link to open full Google Maps.

Desian 6y ago

Thank God that Google don't get design right. Can you imagine the evil that will come out of good designed google services? I like it that way. Keep it crappy google. I use other products already and feed your algos crap with pleasure.:)