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New Google Sheet on half of 13.6" MacBook Air screen is fully covered by popups
- rochak 2y agoI mean, that is just a one time thing right (the first time you land on it)?
- moogleii 2y agoThat's still awful. We've all become complicit of sites spamming popups after first load. It's so annoying.
- ashleyn 2y agoi set my browser zoom to 80% or lower. on a high-DPI screen everything is still perfectly legible and readable. i don't understand the fascination with extra-big-ass fisher-price sized UI elements.
- Borealid 2y agoThe huge UI elements are a consequence of optimizing for touchscreens. Mice (and even touchpads) are very precise pointing devices compared to a toddler's chunky fist. Modern UIs are created assuming you'll be using fingers to interact with them. Mice are an afterthought.
- Gigachad 2y agoI’m pretty sure what happened was all the UI started out big, and then high dpi displays made everything tiny, and eventually UI design caught up and made things legible again. There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
- wtallis 2y agoNo, high dpi displays did not make everything tiny and then huge. They just forced Microsoft to finally put some effort into making their UI scalability work properly. Displays with less than 100 dpi are still widespread, and today's software and web pages have far more padding and wasted space than they did 20 years ago. A 21" 4:3 CRT back then was at least as usable as a 27" 16:9 LCD today despite the newer displays having twice as many pixels. 17" displays in any aspect ratio are frustrating to the point of uselessness on today's desktops, but were fine in the '90s. The UI bloat is real whether you measure in pixels or inches, and very strongly correlated with the rise of touchscreens.
- peeters 2y ago> There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more. I'm reasonably sure most spreadsheet power users would have the opposite preferences to you. I do, for one. Data density is everything in non-trivial spreadsheets.
- toasterlovin 2y agoExactly. Every time I see a new spreadsheet SaaS with the data density of a non-spreadsheet SaaS I immediately dismiss it as a toy.
- moribvndvs 2y agoI used to hate them, too, then my mid-40s happened. I do still think UX designers go a little too ham on padding, though.
- ikidd 2y agoPhones. People will seriously edit spreadsheets on a phone, I've seen it with my own eyes.
- mklepaczewski 2y agoWell, yeah. Companies store a lot of information in spreadsheets. CRM, financial info or really anything. People need to access it from their phones when the data is urgently needed.
- allset_ 2y agoPhone apps can have their own UI layout, font size, etc. though. No reason to force that on desktop users.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago> No reason to force that on desktop users. Of course it is, because of 'mobile first!' Anything else is just more work, and a cost center. So f... it!
- Sharlin 2y agoNobody bothers to think about large screen and mouse UX anymore. Everything's optimized for phones and tablets, and I guess that's where 95% of users are anyway.
- invalidname 2y agoYou're probably young. I can barely see in 100% zoom and going back and forth with reading glasses is very uncomfortable. I spend 90% of my time looking for them. I have an air and a 16 inch Dell. I don't want to lug the Dell around because also, back pain.
- bolognafairy 2y agoYep. If there’s one thing that Big Tech is doing even remotely better at in 2024, it’s letting the self-interest of the increasingly aging top brass guide the ship into making products that don’t assume that everyone is 20 years old with perfect vision. It’s one of the few things that Apple is doing well at, but they’re doing really well at it.
- cma 2y agoExtreme levels of padding just means zoom makes thing tinier than they should have to be, its still a problem even if continuing to zoom out and get more on the screen.
- dawnerd 2y agoA little on accessibility too but there’s a line all these companies cross. Designers are not always UX experts. Google hasn’t had any good UX, period.
- anal_reactor 2y agoPeople have a limit of information they can process at once, which goes higher the more familiar you are with given domain. Previously, having all the buttons visible on main screen was a good thing, because average tech-savvy user had no problem navigating that. But then we made technology accessible to general public, who cannot handle such complexity, therefore we needed to make UIs way simpler.
- XCSme 2y agoBut most UI/UX tutorials often say "more padding/spacing is better".
- c54 2y agoIronically even clicking this imgur link on mobile is half covered by popups (on iOS)
- wackget 2y agoYes, this is horrible UX design and there's absolutely no need for such inflated amounts of padding around everything. Huge companies are the absolute worst offenders for crap like this. Seriously, have you ever tried using Facebook to manage business pages? It is unbelievably poor. Google is by far the most hypocritical, however, because their search engine ranks pages lower for UX sins like "cumulative layout shift" while at the same time committing those sins themselves. (Having said all that, I would not personally expect an online spreadsheet app to look great on "half a 13" screen" on first load.)
- tgma 2y ago> Google is by far the most hypocritical Blame it on Kennedy Gmail rollout which started the waste-the-space movement. Android is also quite a space waster compared to iOS. It's much less comfortable to use a small Android than a small iOS device.
- maeil 2y ago> Android is also quite a space waster compared to iOS. It's much less comfortable to use a small Android than a small iOS device. Now in terms of reading I'm sure you're right, but on small iOS devices the bounding boxes around certain buttons are so unbelievably tight that I even see people who've been using an iPhone mini for years still have to press 4 times to get them to register. Never had that issue with small Androids.
- tgma 2y agoWhich "small Android" is the size of iPhone mini? The ones I have encountered were basically feature phones running Android that I can't remember a single model name. Android went big a lot earlier than iPhone did (iPhone 6/Plus). [Remember "phablet" was a word?] Just the goddamn top bar in Android consumes (used to?) 30% of screen in landscape.
- maeil 2y ago> Which "small Android" is the size of iPhone mini? Unfortunately, only old ones. For Samsung, S8 is when the phones got really big. S7 (5.1 inch) and earlier were smaller than the iPhone 13 mini (5.4) My first Android was the original Galaxy S - comparitively tiny, but I definitely didn't struggle as much to tap buttons as on the 13 mini.
- seb1204 2y agoUI should be considered of my input device, mouse, touchpad or finger all have different need with regards to aiming.
- nguyentranvu 2y agoFor many years, I cannot get the UX of Google. It's just me or anyone?
- Gigachad 2y agoI’ve always found Google sheets to be the easiest one of the lot to use. The OP article is funny but I’ve never seen anything like that any of the times I’ve used it.
- koinedad 2y agoI’ve never been a fan of google UI/UX myself
- hadlock 2y agoIt's not the best, particularly on desktop. I suspect most of the kids they have maintaining their legacy products like Office apps probably grew up on mobile devices and this looks "normal" to them for a desktop app.
- SoftTalker 2y agoPopups announcing new features should be banished to hell. 99.8% of the time I do not care, I just want to open my fucking document and not have to click "got it" on a bunch of feature announcements. If I want to learn about new features I'll go to the Help menu.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago> Popups announcing new features should be banished to hell. But then how will the product manager make the chart go up and to the right?
- r4indeer 2y agoAt least for the "to the right" part, I think the monotonicity of time has that one covered unless someone invents a time machine to improve metrics in the past.
- bolognafairy 2y agoThat’s only 50% of the KPI!
- maeil 2y agoDon't need a time machine for that, just need some good accountants like PWC ;)
- thiht 2y ago> If I want to learn about new features I'll go to the Help menu. No you won’t. There’s nothing wrong with announcing new features, as long as it’s not disruptive and obnoxious, like a pop up. Linear[1] for example adds a small insert at the bottom of the sidebar. It doesn’t take too much space, it’s easy to close, and you can ignore it for as long as you want, it doesn’t prevent you from working. IMO this is the right way to show new features. [1]: https://linear.app https://linear.app
- hadlock 2y ago
- gardnr 2y agoThey could enable dismissing the popups with the escape key or by clicking outside the popup. I have to admit, I've just closed the tab a few times instead of acquiescing to click "got it".
- aitchnyu 2y agoAround 2004 there was an invite only email that... took you straight to inbox once you logged in, not to a landing page with news and weather. Years later, I'm dumbfounded by other Google products like Firebase and GCP which send massive js blobs and marketing pages in the product.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago> Around 2004 there was an invite only email that... took you straight to inbox once you logged in, not to a landing page with news and weather. In 2024 it's still like that. Only inbox no news or weather.
- rudedogg 2y agoStackOverflow is almost like that if you don't have an adblocker.
- metadat 2y agoAll StackOverflow sites have is a GDPR cookie banner. It's annoying, but not the same.
- wtallis 2y agoI just went to StackOverflow, where I'm logged in and don't get the GDPR box. With my browser at 100% zoom, it's over 400 pixels from the top of the page down to the top of the first question's box. Over 100 of those pixels are a banner saying "Welcome back, (username)". Their landing page is absolutely polluted with UI bloat that is far beyond just the GDPR box. The first piece of real content is literally on the bottom half of my laptop screen. Even the ~56px sticky floating header is clearly superfluous; getting back to the top of the page to access those UI elements is far too easy to justify keeping those controls on screen at all times.
- netsharc 2y agoI've managed to create an uBlock Origin element hider to hide the DIV with that particular CSS class (or ID?) across all of their sites - hiding it on just 1 site would disappoint because they use so many goddamn domains.
- Squeeeez 2y agoEver heard of violentmonkey? Sounds like a good opportunity for userscripts
- fanf2 2y agoThey also have a Google popup.
- oofabz 2y agoNever had this problem with Gnumeric
- LeFantome 2y agoYa, when Gnumeric fails to load in my browser, there are never any annoying “Got it” buttons that make it work.
- geor9e 2y ago[flagged]
- bmcahren 2y agoGoogle is becoming less useful in many ways. Their "push for AI adoption" in sheets and docs proves they no longer know how to build products people want to use and must use tactics like this to farm engagement. They are playing the same playbook as Google+. Soon we'll be forced to use Gemini to open Sheets in a tone-deaf IVR voice "If you could tell me a few words about what you're opening Sheets about, I can better direct your experience." I almost think they want people to hate AI so they think it's garbage and don't switch to using chat.com vs google.com for searching which has been scary how much better it is without all the ads and the relevance to what you want to find.
- alecthomas 2y agoPeak enshittification.
- LeFantome 2y agoYou will come to regret this comment when you realize later how much you wish the way things are now ( as we near the true peak ).
- spaceman_2020 2y agoSomeone is getting 400k/year to make that padding
- metadat 2y ago400k base salary. 800k - 2m USD with stock.
- joebob42 2y agoThat's director or higher (and the upper end is at least a vp). I mean, there probably is a director involved, but they definitely aren't the one making the padding.
- bolognafairy 2y agoThey’re the one that demanded it. Don’t try to pretend that any more than 1% of the people at Google are actually doing anything that moves even the slightest needle, regardless of ‘rank’.
- new_user_final 2y agoAnd didn't even bother to check the responsiveness of the Google AI popup. How is it even possible with so many peer review!
- revskill 2y agoThe imgur website is the worst.
- asciimov 2y agoThat’s just The Google Rot™ leaking out. It’s the one product I wish they would kill off already.
- superultra 2y agoAs a marketer I recognize this and it’s the result of territorial marketing agendas at war over IAM, In-App Messaging, the holy grail of conversion funnels. It’s a shame that Google is being run by marketers rather than engineers. And I say that as a marketer. When engineers were running the company this shit didn’t happen. Now we’re watching the inch by inch trench warfare of various teams at Google vying for quarterly KPIs and it sucks bad. I anxiously await the next Google to usurp what Google has become, which is a kinda of proto IBM/GE.
- userbinator 2y agoI have a userscript that changes "Got it" to "Fuck off", because that's what I mutter to myself every time I get bombarded with those distractions.
- ziofill 2y agohow did you do it? care to share the code?
- skhr0680 2y agodocument.getElementById("divA").textContent = "This text is different!"; from: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/textContent https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/textCo...
- baal80spam 2y agoWell this would work, but I think the parent asked how to change all "Got it"s to "Fuck off"s :-)
- likeclockwork 2y agoGot it.
- qq99 2y agoRough lol. I can always recommend people who are looking for a web spreadsheet to try https://www.thebricks.com/ https://www.thebricks.com/ instead
- tlhunter 2y agoEvery sheet I open lately wants to turn my data into a "table". What the fuck? It's already a table.
- noio 2y agoI’m thinking “tables” are part of some kind of “extend, extinguish” strategy? I.e. reducing compatibility with Excel to make it harder to just leave with your data. I could be wrong.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago1) 13" Air has a resolution of 2560x1664 this screenshot is 1446x1534. So the window was intentionally resized to almost half width to mislead. 2) one of the popups is an ad for their ai thing, but it has a huge close button and supposedly shows once. 3) the other popup is showing you that google has added easy table templates (and from what i have seen those types of tables are like 90% of google sheets uses)
- foogazi 2y agoThe title says it’s half the screen 1446x1534 should be enough to see actual content
- y42 2y agoIt's not only Google Sheets, you can find this on every (major) website. Linking to a thread on x shows you 4 pop overs. One with a notice, the second showing a cookie advice and two of them asking you to register, while one of the two is overlapping another register element on the side. I wonder if the ones in charge are even trying to offer a reasonable ux?
- mysterydip 2y agoIronically, imgur took up half my screen on mobile with popups while I was trying to look at this image.
- e-clinton 2y agoIf only Google’s Product teams were a tenth as good as their engineering teams.