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Here is one concrete example of something that Google simply gets wrong. They should pay external competent programmers to come in. Ask the programmer, using
by btilly 3y ago
Here is one concrete example of something that Google simply gets wrong.
They should pay external competent programmers to come in. Ask the programmer, using Google's public documentation, figure out how to do standard task X that the programmer has never done before. Say, build a Google script connector for a Looker report. Or navigate OAuth 2. Give them any necessary resources. And film it.
Do you have any idea how many ways that they would find to improve their documentation for this kind of use case? Or how much they would improve adoption of technically excellent products.
- roflyear 3y agoWhat benefit would this give Google?
- SQueeeeeL 3y agoSubstantially more usable documentation
- candiddevmike 3y agoLevelset what kind of skills their customers actually have vs what their libraries and documentation assume they have. Google tends to create things that work only for Google.
- btilly 3y agoImproved adoption of their platform and products.
- x86x87 3y agopeople actually using their products once they fix it?
- bbor 3y agoI’ve always found this somewhat absurd. I get that big companies are complex and projects come and go, but it is SO bad. I consider myself a decent SWE in the relevant domain, and after a certain amount of hours spent just trying to make some calls to Google Maps API from a non-colab python server without rolling my own interface around raw URLs, I just had to blame google a little bit. Of course, in the end there’s a beautiful dead-simple solution
- x86x87 3y agothese things happen (maybe not at Google) and they are called UX studies. I have been part of them and it's very enlightening for the team that builds something and understands the ins and outs to see just how poor the experience is.