11 ms·

Someone in Google’s UX and Design department, really needs go out and breathe some fresh air. Is it only me, who dislikes 95% of the design decision of Google

Someone in Google’s UX and Design department, really needs go out and breathe some fresh air. Is it only me, who dislikes 95% of the design decision of Google products in the recent years?

toper-centage 6y ago
Google is data driven and AB tests the hell out of their features, so I would assume these changes make them money somehow. Your personal preferences or anyone else's is merely a very small data point in their design process.
- thotsBgone 6y ago
  Yes, companies are profit-driven always. Not customer-satisfaction driven, unless that's what will bring them the most profit (especially true for newer, smaller companies). This makes me wonder if there is some structure similar to a corporation which would maximise something besides profit, without either being out-competed by a corporation or turning into one.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Competition ("out-compete") implies competition on some metric such as profitability. So, if that's the metric, then they'll be profit-driven. Of course, profitability can be optimized for over different time horizons--even if speculatively. For public companies, time horizons tend to be relatively short, or at least quarter-to-quarter profitability is important. A private company, however structured, can define out-competing however its owners want to so long as it can pay its bills and employees.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    It's not exactly what you describe, but you might be interested in looking into cooperatives. https://cdsus.coop/about/what-is-a-co-op/ https://cdsus.coop/about/what-is-a-co-op/
  - astrange 6y ago
    Public companies are driven by what their executives want, insofar as their owners aren't paying attention. If they were pure paperclip maximizers they would switch businesses more often, but you don't see coal plants selling fentanyl out the back.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Doctors used to believe that basic hygiene was unnecessary despite having enough information in theory to figure out this wasn't so. The presumption that someone in theory has access to lots of information and therefore is making the best or even good decisions on some dimensions by virtue of the their access to data is poorly considered. It is entirely possible to be smart and possessed of good data and still use it poorly. People are flawed so companies made of of people are also flawed. Google image search is a poor product not worth using compared to bing.
  - gradys 6y ago
    I guess the question here is who is more like those doctors in this scenario: you, or the people running the randomized controlled trials?
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      It's kind of contrary for you to prove that google's design is optimal according to the scientific method with the bald assertion that it is scientific with zero evidence by virtue of it being proprietary. My feeling about its utility isn't a scientific statement its purely anecdotal but at least it represents a singular actual and honest viewpoint. You are free if you liked to express the alternative perspective that the changes are for the better for users or for google and this would be an equally honest anecdote even if we disagree. The only intellectually dishonest viewpoint is to assert without detail or analysis that its good along some dimension because it is AB tested. Google image search is mediocre for the following reasons - They removed the button to actually go TO the image in response to a lawsuit with Getty on the theory that somehow making people go through an extra step would stop people from using their built in browser tools to download images. - When you go to the page where the image is supposed to be you may actually find yourself on a page only vaguely related to the exact image. Maybe it WAS found on the front page of some infinite scroll through crap but the desired image is nowhere to be found when you click through and get whatever new crap replaced it on the front page. - Alternatively you get served a smaller sized version of the image. - Not only are the filters not shown by default in google image search vs bing in mobile firefox google opted to disable that functionality meaning you had to load the slower desktop version of google for the tools to filter by date or other details to show up. This wasn't a bug it was a deliberate design decision to attack a competitor that they ultimately reversed later. - Google image search seems to deliver subjectively worse image search results. I realize this is hard to quantify. - On the broader google search issues you actually need an extension to be able to right click on a link and copy the url to share it because otherwise you get something like this https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjJ24eN86HuAhWlGjQIHY9pAmwQFjANegQIHRAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThis_is_a_test&usg=AOvVaw1KpiL1SKMGAZK2BW1z-C9V https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_a_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_a_test It's pretty amazing to break sharing a damn link. The addon to fix this requires worrisome permissions to the data for google.com Also the search "this is a test" without adblock doesn't show any of the textual results on the entire screen on a 24" 1080p monitor. Screen 1 and 2 are a video, exhortations to buy the song, people also search for videos and finally some actual results on screen 3. Google is basically 90s Lycos with lots of extra money and reach. Everything google does other than ads and chrome ranges from acceptable to just canceled. They do lots of things OK but nothing excellent.
- fbelzile 6y ago
  I wish it was money they optimized for. It's probably engagement or some other obscure marketing metric. The problem with that is if they introduce a bug that requires you to refresh the page more often. All they'd see is an up-tick in "engagement" and keep the change with the bug. I think it happened to me with Facebook page notifications and not being able to clear them properly, at least on Firefox...
Triv888 6y ago
The only thing that I like about gmail.com is the search feature and the fact that most of my accounts are tied to it. But I use Thunderbird for getting my emails...
kungito 6y ago
I'm pretty sure that the big corps are changing the design based on some toxic metrics where they don't really care if we, a small demographic of power users, get annoyed all the time
- userbinator 6y ago
  "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."
- astrange 6y ago
  I think the power users are actually just perpetually annoyed, find software features to assign it to, and then we end up with reverse causation.
catillac 6y ago
I am a designer and my opinion is that they’re micro optimizing with A/B testing to such a degree that they miss other significantly different paths that would be better overall.
- grenoire 6y ago
  It really does seem a local/global maxima problem with the way they're trying to improve. I think they've been locking themselves into the local maxima, and at their scale it's probably really hard to expand the search beyond what's 'safe and known.'
clintonc 6y ago
The main changes this extension addresses were made because of a settlement with Getty Images. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...
- Lammy 6y ago
  The worst part of the settlement isn't even the UI changes but how the image search results now seem to favor showing Youtube video frames above showing regular images from non-Google websites. I guess they get to pass the buck to the video uploaders who have asserted (truthfully or not) that they have a right to upload whatever they're uploading and that they "grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business"
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    I guess one of the ranking signals is probably "amount of legal trouble this result will get us into".
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  Yup, we can cut them slack on this one -- they didn't want to make it worse.
fuzzy2 6y ago
They’re in good company though. UI/UX in general is going to hell. Not just in $big_corp, but nearly everywhere. I think that’s mainly because we have UI/UX as a dedicated function now. It’s a job that seems to attract people that don’t know how software _works_. This results in “uncanny” UX that looks similar enough but just doesn’t work the way it should. Maybe I’m just getting old though!
- 101008 6y ago
  I am interested in your point of view. Care to expand?
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    I'm not the parent poster but I see where they're coming from - form used to purely _follow_ function in computer UI/UX (as in most engineering fields) but now it's been delegated to "creatives" who, by virtue of their skill set, put form first. Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.
    - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
      I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional. A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well. And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.
      - 6y ago
neilpanchal 6y ago
There are so many things that bother me about contemporary UI in general, I ranted on here the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of predictability, etc. are all symptoms of this. There are still some gems that I find here and there: https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/ https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/
- userbinator 6y ago
  Minimalism, too much white space Those two tend to be related. It really angers me every time I see a huge amount of whitespace for no good reason, but then most of the functionality is hidden behind a dropdown menu whose equally stupid '...' indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF. Back when UIs were still good, things would usually be hidden only if there wasn't enough space. You could see almost everything you needed at a glance. The "designers" dismiss that as "messy" and "clutter", which is frankly absurd --- something functional is not going to look "clean", much like a machine shop that's in active use: Tools and parts are laid out everywhere, because the user needs access to them. That diskprices.com site is great. Craigslist is another one that comes to mind. The only thing it's missing is a "submit" button for those who have JS disabled... otherwise it's a perfect example of extremely functional design that wasn't ruined by "UI/UX designers".
  - towndrunk 6y ago
    "indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF." My wife and I had this conversation the other day. There are things in iOS you only get or see if you long press. How the hell are you to discover these things?
    - codetrotter 6y ago
      > How the hell are you to discover these things? Sometimes by accident, sometimes from hearing about it from others, sometimes from searching on Google for how to do something.
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Definitely. They had their nice moments when they introduced the first version of material design, but it got rather ugly when they started putting outlined icons everywhere.
de6u99er 6y ago
I disabled YouTube on my Android phone, and use it in the browser instead. It is heavily overloaded with functionality, that any accidental touch results in an unwanted action. Google Search on mobile browsers is horrible too. When having a typo in the search terms and trying to fix it, the search field moves to the top of the screen and it constantly happens that I click on the second or third entry in the list of suggested searches. I also have issues with GBoard, which cause tons of typing errors. My last iPhone was an iPhone 3G and I recall it having a much better keyboard many years ago than Google currently has. It's almost as it was deliberate to artificially increase certain click KPI's or force users to use the phone's search bar or autocorrect function. I believe, decision makers at Google are too far away from the products, and while managers might have developed good soft skills they massively lack practical knowledge. Google would do good hiring more engineers and less academics and managers.
- supersour 6y ago
  Speaking of Youtube "mods", has anyone created any tools that provide a unique related videos algorithm or the like? I find that the rabbit holes I went on years ago were much more interesting than the content I see on youtube now, and I don't think it's that the content is getting worse.
- anothernewdude 6y ago
  I cannot recommend the combination of NewPipe and VLC enough. Have to get NewPipe on your own, because it disables youtube ads as well so it's not on the Play Store. It's been the only offline youtube solution I've found.
  - de6u99er 6y ago
    Thanks, I'll give it a try.
  - morsch 6y ago
    Paying Google is another offline youtube solution. It's odd, though, I watch much more youtube than Netflix at the moment, but since all the stuff on youtube is available anyway, the monthly subscription still feels too expensive, despite being cheaper than Netflix. I wish they would unbundle their music offering, which I have no interest in, but presumably that's precisely why they won't unbundle.
hangtwenty 6y ago
You are not alone! And I am very, very pissed off at the neglect of Google Classroom's UI. I wish they had (and would still) stay out of education, it's so irresponsible to half-ass it like they have. Google Classroom's UI problems have got to be negatively impacting kids' schooling. It's unethical.
cosmodisk 6y ago
From what I remember reading some comments from ex googlers some years ago is that if you can't quantity something nobody will be listening too serious. So designer have difficult times there:)
Havoc 6y ago
Not just google. e.g. Reddits new interface is in the same league
- nicbou 6y ago
  It features many quality of life improvements, but it's slow as molasses and obviously geared towards a very different kind of community.

Someone in Google’s UX and Design department, really needs go out and breathe some fresh air. Is it only me, who dislikes 95% of the design decision of Google products in the recent years?

toper-centage 6y ago

Google is data driven and AB tests the hell out of their features, so I would assume these changes make them money somehow. Your personal preferences or anyone else's is merely a very small data point in their design process.

thotsBgone 6y ago
Yes, companies are profit-driven always. Not customer-satisfaction driven, unless that's what will bring them the most profit (especially true for newer, smaller companies). This makes me wonder if there is some structure similar to a corporation which would maximise something besides profit, without either being out-competed by a corporation or turning into one.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Competition ("out-compete") implies competition on some metric such as profitability. So, if that's the metric, then they'll be profit-driven. Of course, profitability can be optimized for over different time horizons--even if speculatively. For public companies, time horizons tend to be relatively short, or at least quarter-to-quarter profitability is important. A private company, however structured, can define out-competing however its owners want to so long as it can pay its bills and employees.
- smichel17 6y ago
  It's not exactly what you describe, but you might be interested in looking into cooperatives. https://cdsus.coop/about/what-is-a-co-op/ https://cdsus.coop/about/what-is-a-co-op/
- astrange 6y ago
  Public companies are driven by what their executives want, insofar as their owners aren't paying attention. If they were pure paperclip maximizers they would switch businesses more often, but you don't see coal plants selling fentanyl out the back.
michaelmrose 6y ago
Doctors used to believe that basic hygiene was unnecessary despite having enough information in theory to figure out this wasn't so. The presumption that someone in theory has access to lots of information and therefore is making the best or even good decisions on some dimensions by virtue of the their access to data is poorly considered. It is entirely possible to be smart and possessed of good data and still use it poorly. People are flawed so companies made of of people are also flawed. Google image search is a poor product not worth using compared to bing.
- gradys 6y ago
  I guess the question here is who is more like those doctors in this scenario: you, or the people running the randomized controlled trials?
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    It's kind of contrary for you to prove that google's design is optimal according to the scientific method with the bald assertion that it is scientific with zero evidence by virtue of it being proprietary. My feeling about its utility isn't a scientific statement its purely anecdotal but at least it represents a singular actual and honest viewpoint. You are free if you liked to express the alternative perspective that the changes are for the better for users or for google and this would be an equally honest anecdote even if we disagree. The only intellectually dishonest viewpoint is to assert without detail or analysis that its good along some dimension because it is AB tested. Google image search is mediocre for the following reasons - They removed the button to actually go TO the image in response to a lawsuit with Getty on the theory that somehow making people go through an extra step would stop people from using their built in browser tools to download images. - When you go to the page where the image is supposed to be you may actually find yourself on a page only vaguely related to the exact image. Maybe it WAS found on the front page of some infinite scroll through crap but the desired image is nowhere to be found when you click through and get whatever new crap replaced it on the front page. - Alternatively you get served a smaller sized version of the image. - Not only are the filters not shown by default in google image search vs bing in mobile firefox google opted to disable that functionality meaning you had to load the slower desktop version of google for the tools to filter by date or other details to show up. This wasn't a bug it was a deliberate design decision to attack a competitor that they ultimately reversed later. - Google image search seems to deliver subjectively worse image search results. I realize this is hard to quantify. - On the broader google search issues you actually need an extension to be able to right click on a link and copy the url to share it because otherwise you get something like this https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjJ24eN86HuAhWlGjQIHY9pAmwQFjANegQIHRAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FThis_is_a_test&usg=AOvVaw1KpiL1SKMGAZK2BW1z-C9V https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c... instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_a_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_is_a_test It's pretty amazing to break sharing a damn link. The addon to fix this requires worrisome permissions to the data for google.com Also the search "this is a test" without adblock doesn't show any of the textual results on the entire screen on a 24" 1080p monitor. Screen 1 and 2 are a video, exhortations to buy the song, people also search for videos and finally some actual results on screen 3. Google is basically 90s Lycos with lots of extra money and reach. Everything google does other than ads and chrome ranges from acceptable to just canceled. They do lots of things OK but nothing excellent.
fbelzile 6y ago
I wish it was money they optimized for. It's probably engagement or some other obscure marketing metric. The problem with that is if they introduce a bug that requires you to refresh the page more often. All they'd see is an up-tick in "engagement" and keep the change with the bug. I think it happened to me with Facebook page notifications and not being able to clear them properly, at least on Firefox...

Triv888 6y ago

The only thing that I like about gmail.com is the search feature and the fact that most of my accounts are tied to it. But I use Thunderbird for getting my emails...

kungito 6y ago

I'm pretty sure that the big corps are changing the design based on some toxic metrics where they don't really care if we, a small demographic of power users, get annoyed all the time

userbinator 6y ago
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."
astrange 6y ago
I think the power users are actually just perpetually annoyed, find software features to assign it to, and then we end up with reverse causation.

catillac 6y ago

I am a designer and my opinion is that they’re micro optimizing with A/B testing to such a degree that they miss other significantly different paths that would be better overall.

grenoire 6y ago
It really does seem a local/global maxima problem with the way they're trying to improve. I think they've been locking themselves into the local maxima, and at their scale it's probably really hard to expand the search beyond what's 'safe and known.'

clintonc 6y ago

The main changes this extension addresses were made because of a settlement with Getty Images. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after-google-removes-view-image-button-bowing-to-getty/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages-after...

Lammy 6y ago
The worst part of the settlement isn't even the UI changes but how the image search results now seem to favor showing Youtube video frames above showing regular images from non-Google websites. I guess they get to pass the buck to the video uploaders who have asserted (truthfully or not) that they have a right to upload whatever they're uploading and that they "grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors' and Affiliates') business"
- londons_explore 6y ago
  I guess one of the ranking signals is probably "amount of legal trouble this result will get us into".
bonestamp2 6y ago
Yup, we can cut them slack on this one -- they didn't want to make it worse.

fuzzy2 6y ago

They’re in good company though. UI/UX in general is going to hell. Not just in $big_corp, but nearly everywhere. I think that’s mainly because we have UI/UX as a dedicated function now. It’s a job that seems to attract people that don’t know how software _works_. This results in “uncanny” UX that looks similar enough but just doesn’t work the way it should. Maybe I’m just getting old though!

101008 6y ago
I am interested in your point of view. Care to expand?
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  I'm not the parent poster but I see where they're coming from - form used to purely _follow_ function in computer UI/UX (as in most engineering fields) but now it's been delegated to "creatives" who, by virtue of their skill set, put form first. Overall "betterness" is subjective, but speaking as someone who uses a computer as a tool I can honestly say I'd prefer it to function pragmatically than look pretty, if the prettiness requires sacrificing of pragmatism in some way.
  - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
    I'm not sure I see any reason to expect or believe that engineers would make good ui/ux decisions. It's not clear to me that choices that are simple for engineering are necessarily even aligned with ultimately being functional. A good ui/ux specialist will be interested in reducing error rates and improving ease of discovery and use through affordances and good organization of information and actions. Obviously other business interest may conflict with those goals but those same interests are capable of corrupting engineering as well. And I don't think ui/ux work is as recent as this is all making it sound. Perhaps it is more common now even for orgs where their bread and butter isn't software but ultimately making tools useful and safe and accessible predates software entirely.
    - 6y ago

neilpanchal 6y ago

There are so many things that bother me about contemporary UI in general, I ranted on here the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 I sincerely feel that the discipline of building user interfaces is long lost and perhaps never to come back. From car dashboards to loud typography, the whole field is regressing. Minimalism, too much white space, infantilization of users, design trends, loss of predictability, etc. are all symptoms of this. There are still some gems that I find here and there: https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/ https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/

userbinator 6y ago
Minimalism, too much white space Those two tend to be related. It really angers me every time I see a huge amount of whitespace for no good reason, but then most of the functionality is hidden behind a dropdown menu whose equally stupid '...' indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF. Back when UIs were still good, things would usually be hidden only if there wasn't enough space. You could see almost everything you needed at a glance. The "designers" dismiss that as "messy" and "clutter", which is frankly absurd --- something functional is not going to look "clean", much like a machine shop that's in active use: Tools and parts are laid out everywhere, because the user needs access to them. That diskprices.com site is great. Craigslist is another one that comes to mind. The only thing it's missing is a "submit" button for those who have JS disabled... otherwise it's a perfect example of extremely functional design that wasn't ruined by "UI/UX designers".
- towndrunk 6y ago
  "indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF." My wife and I had this conversation the other day. There are things in iOS you only get or see if you long press. How the hell are you to discover these things?
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    > How the hell are you to discover these things? Sometimes by accident, sometimes from hearing about it from others, sometimes from searching on Google for how to do something.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Definitely. They had their nice moments when they introduced the first version of material design, but it got rather ugly when they started putting outlined icons everywhere.

de6u99er 6y ago

I disabled YouTube on my Android phone, and use it in the browser instead. It is heavily overloaded with functionality, that any accidental touch results in an unwanted action. Google Search on mobile browsers is horrible too. When having a typo in the search terms and trying to fix it, the search field moves to the top of the screen and it constantly happens that I click on the second or third entry in the list of suggested searches. I also have issues with GBoard, which cause tons of typing errors. My last iPhone was an iPhone 3G and I recall it having a much better keyboard many years ago than Google currently has. It's almost as it was deliberate to artificially increase certain click KPI's or force users to use the phone's search bar or autocorrect function. I believe, decision makers at Google are too far away from the products, and while managers might have developed good soft skills they massively lack practical knowledge. Google would do good hiring more engineers and less academics and managers.

supersour 6y ago
Speaking of Youtube "mods", has anyone created any tools that provide a unique related videos algorithm or the like? I find that the rabbit holes I went on years ago were much more interesting than the content I see on youtube now, and I don't think it's that the content is getting worse.
anothernewdude 6y ago
I cannot recommend the combination of NewPipe and VLC enough. Have to get NewPipe on your own, because it disables youtube ads as well so it's not on the Play Store. It's been the only offline youtube solution I've found.
- de6u99er 6y ago
  Thanks, I'll give it a try.
- morsch 6y ago
  Paying Google is another offline youtube solution. It's odd, though, I watch much more youtube than Netflix at the moment, but since all the stuff on youtube is available anyway, the monthly subscription still feels too expensive, despite being cheaper than Netflix. I wish they would unbundle their music offering, which I have no interest in, but presumably that's precisely why they won't unbundle.

hangtwenty 6y ago

You are not alone! And I am very, very pissed off at the neglect of Google Classroom's UI. I wish they had (and would still) stay out of education, it's so irresponsible to half-ass it like they have. Google Classroom's UI problems have got to be negatively impacting kids' schooling. It's unethical.

cosmodisk 6y ago

From what I remember reading some comments from ex googlers some years ago is that if you can't quantity something nobody will be listening too serious. So designer have difficult times there:)

Havoc 6y ago

Not just google. e.g. Reddits new interface is in the same league

nicbou 6y ago
It features many quality of life improvements, but it's slow as molasses and obviously geared towards a very different kind of community.