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Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture w

Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everything you are trying to do needs a click of sorts. Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. Most of the rest of his lessons while valuable in their own right, are not something I would put under the headline of "after X years at <insert-major-tech-company>", as they do not quite seem to be that different from lessons you pick up at other companies ? I´d more interested to hear about how the culture was impacted when the bean-counters took over and started entshittifying the company for both the users and the employees too.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users It's worth noting that Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users. It might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company.
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  Ah, I see. I did notice it looked a bit too long-winded and fluffy for a developer-written text.
- vcsuspect 10mo ago
  [dead]
- drewda 10mo ago
  Fair point. "User" as developer rather than "user" as person clicking buttons in Gmail, Google Maps, etc, etc
  - luckylion 10mo ago
    I think that's more "this sounds great" than "our users are developers". Google's services also aren't aimed at developers, the APIs are often very bureaucratic and not very well done (there's no way to list the available google sheets documents in the sheets api, I need the drive API and a different set of permissions? please.) It reads exactly like what you'd expect from a "I want to be considered a thought leader" person: nothing you haven't read a hundred times but it sounds nice so you can nod along.
- techsystems 10mo ago
  >Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer Oh
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    That's not a fair reading, he's as much of a developer as anyone else. But he wasn't (AFAIK) working on user-facing products specifically.
    - alemanek 10mo ago
      I think it is more the point that the users for his job were external developers. The role is inherently user facing and user focused. I don’t think anyone was trying to say he wasn’t a developer just that his job wasn’t to directly develop products
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        Yeah, I guess I just wanted to add that because of the way that quote was cut at the end, made me believe that the person quoting me thought Osmani "isn't a developer".
- kinlan 10mo ago
  I was Addy's manager when he was on Developer Relations. He moved to an engineering manager role on Chrome DevTools many years ago and has recently just moved on to a different team. I don't think it's fair at all to say he's not a developer working on a product shipped to users when he led one of our most used developer tools, as well as worked on many of our developer libraries prior to moving to the Engineering manager role.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    Yeah, maybe I should have been more precise, I meant "end users like your mom" rather than "not real users". Developing for developers, in a engineering-heavy team is obviously different than the typical product-development team.
steve-atx-7600 10mo ago
You can learn something at a company by observing it’s weaknesses as well as strengths
RamblingCTO 10mo ago
And material UI is still the worst of all UIs. Had the pleasure of rolling out a production oauth client ... jesus christ. Only worse is microsoft in UX. You don't want me to use your services, do you?
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > And material UI is still the worst of all UIs I'm not sure how that got approved either, but at least we now know what would happen if a massive corporation created a UI/UX toolkit, driven only by quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight. Really is the peak of the "data-driven decisions above all" era.
  - andrekandre 10mo ago
    > quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight the root of all evil right there...
  - RamblingCTO 10mo ago
    What makes me wonder even more: why is this still in place? Someone must've noticed themselves when using it
websiteapi 10mo ago
which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary
- addaon 10mo ago
  Omni Group. Wolfram. Parts of Apple. Rhino3D. Parts of Breville. Prusa (on device, not on desktop). Speed Queen (dial-based). Just from applications I currently have open and devices I can see from where I'm sitting.
  - websiteapi 10mo ago
    I mean something that has a clear Google analog/equivalent that way can compare on. I personally think Wolfram Alpha (assuming that's what you're talking about) isn't any better than Google.
    - addaon 10mo ago
      Never really used Alpha, was talking about Mathematica. I don’t the the web is compatible with good UX, but that doesn’t mean good UX isn’t possible — it just means that the companies that are successful at UX build native applications, or physical objects, or both.
- ajross 10mo ago
  No one's. Everyone sucks. Find a product and you'll find a population collating complaints about it. Whining about interface design is like the cheapest form of shared currency in our subculture. Fundamentally it's a bikeshed effect. Complaining about hard features like performance is likely to get you in trouble if you aren't actually doing the leg work to measure it and/or expert enough to shout down the people who show up to argue. But UI paradigms are inherently squishy and subjective, so you get to grouse without consequences.
- drnick1 10mo ago
  None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware. For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.
Aurornis 10mo ago
The short answer is that the UI isn’t optimized for users like you. I haven’t worked for Google specifically, but at this scale everything gets tested and optimized. I would guess they know power users like you are frustrated, but they know you’ll figure it out anyway. So the UX is optimized for a simpler target audience and possibly even for simpler help documents, not to ensure power users can get things done as quickly as possible.
- dtech 10mo ago
  I feel like you're giving too much credit here. I don't know if it was a leak or an urban legend, but I remember the awful win 8 "flat boxes UI" being that way because it could be designed by managers in PowerPoint that way
- rustystump 10mo ago
  This is almost certainly not the case. The larger the company the more change is viewed as a negative. Yes people may hold titles to do the things you describe but none are empowered to make change.
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  The specific feature in question...there is nothing "power" about it. It was a non-feature for decades essentially, I dont recall ever not being able to simply change an e-mail address by moving the cursor and typing in something else. How on earth is this something tested and optimised, for whom exactly?
- Yizahi 10mo ago
  Google UI seemingly is optimized for happy path cases. Search for the obvious word and click a relevant link on the screen which appears. Write a single response to a single email and abandon than conversation afterwards, always use new conversations for every new email. Click a recommended video thumbnail on the frontpage and then continue with autoplay. Put only short defined text type in the cells of a spreadsheet, like date/number/text etc. And so on with all of their products. But as soon as user tries to search for something no on the first page, or reply to a 10-20+ message thread with attachments in history, or tries to use playlists or search in YT, or input a slightly more complex data in the sheet cells - then all hell breaks loose. Just the latest Google thing I've experienced - a default system Watch Later playlist is now hidden on Android. It's gone, no traces, no way to search for it. The only remnant of it is a 2-second popup after adding a new video to Watch Later, you can press "view" and then see it. Meanwhile it is still present as a separate item on PC. I'm writing this eaxmple because that was deliberate, that was no error or regression. Someone created a Jira for that and someone resolved it.
ignoramous 10mo ago
> wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse UX? Google doesn't even bother helping folks locked out of their Gmail accounts. For people who use Android (some 3bn), that's like a digital death sentence, with real-world consequences. It is almost comical that anyone would think Google is customer-focused, but might if they were being paid handsomely to think otherwise, all the while drinking a lot of kool-aid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024754 The top comment there is from a Xoogler which sums it up nicely: The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people. Companies love the benefits that come from scale, like having a billion people use their service, but they never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it :( Google rakes in $100bn a quarter; that's $1bn every day.
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  That is a great point too. For a company which effectively does not have a customer service, how can they claim to be obsessing about helping users at all?
- stefanfisk 10mo ago
  Hell, in my experience they often don’t even help ad customers that are having issues that prevent them from buying ads.
- omnifischer 10mo ago
  And how are they supposed to do it if users did not add proper 2FA (and backup those recovery keys)? Even banks are struggling to authenticate folks. For a longtime in EU people with 3rd world passports cannot create accounts easily. Google cannot connect identity of a person to email address easily. Or they need to create CS - that will authenticate passports? And hundreds of countries, stolen IDs? Nay. > The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people > never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it Same thing with govts. If you go to driver license. passport or any govt office then there will one person with some strange issue.
dijit 10mo ago
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much Ok, I mean this sincerely. You must never have used Microsoft tools. They managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX. Azure? Teams? PowerBI? It's a total joke compared to even the most gnarly of google services (or FOSS tools, like Gerrit).
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.
  - ghaff 10mo ago
    There was also MSDN. But it was also a different world at the time.
  - datadrivenangel 10mo ago
    With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software... And the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it.
  - dijit 10mo ago
    > If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. But even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot. It was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them.
jwr 10mo ago
I was also surprised to read this. I have terrible problems with all Google UIs. I can never find anything and it's an exercise in frustration to get anywhere.
gniv 10mo ago
I have an issue with the first point as well, but differently. Having worked on a user-facing product with millions of users, the challenge was not finding user problems, but finding frequent user problems. In a sufficiently complex product there are thousands of different issues that users encounter. But it's non-trivial to know what to prioritize.
mike_hearn 10mo ago
> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock" When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was: • Almost nobody else in engineering did this. • I was considered weird for doing it. • It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees. • An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic. • The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring. In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly. This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.
- p1esk 10mo ago
  Almost nobody else in engineering did this. What you described is the job of a product manager. Are there no PMs at Google?
  - Xorlev 10mo ago
Bombthecat 10mo ago
It's not just Google, the UX is degrading in... Well everything. I think it's because companies are in a duopole, monopole etc position. They only do what the numbers tell them. Nothing else and UX just does not matter anymore. It's like those gacha which make billions. Terrible games, almost zero depth, but people spend thousands in them. Not because they are good, but because they don't have much choice ( similar game without gacha) and part the game loop is made for addiction and build around numbers.
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  To offer some additional causes for the degradation of UX: 1. An increasing part of industry profits started coming from entertainment (or worse, psychological exploitation) instead of selling the customer a useful tool. For example, good budgeting-software has to help the user understand and model and achieve a goal, while a "good" slot-machine may benefit from confusion and distraction and a giant pull-handle. 2. "Must work on a touchscreen that fits in a pocket" support drags certain things to a lowest common denominator. 3. UX as a switching-cost for customers has started happening more on a per-product rather than a per-OS basis. Instead of learning the Windows or Mac "way" of screens and shortcuts, individual programs--especially those dang Electron apps--make their own reinventions of the wheel.
whyagaindavid 10mo ago
This is definitely an edge case. Most UI/UX from Google is very consistent and just works. Otherwise they won't be in this market. Only UI/UX issue is that most experienced users want to not adapt to change. It is like people always telling Windows 7 is the best. Don't keep reinventing. Another one that irks me is every UI/UX dev assumes people have 2 x 4K monitors and menu items overflow.
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  > Only UI/UX issue is that most experienced users want to not adapt to change Users will not only adapt, but will even champion your changes if they make sense to said users. For example the web checkout or to name a more drastic example, iPhone and fingers as user interface devices. Once you start convincing the users that the interface is great, but they are too resistant to changes/dumb/uncreative to know how use it... its a different story I´d reckon ;)
lkjdsklf 10mo ago
I think the UX issues you’re describing are less related to culture changes in companies and more just in the industry in general UX are designed by and for people who don’t really use computers. They use mobile devices and tablets It’s an industry wide phenomenon
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  You are onto something there, if you mean, the design roles being taken over by the people who are not techies - like the POs. But if you just refer to UX being designed for mobile devices - that is not an excuse for an even worse UX on the mobile. If anything I would have expected more effort put in there, given how many more issues the limited screen estate can cause...
  - lkjdsklf 10mo ago
    It’s designed for virtual keyboards rather than real ones That makes a bigger difference than screen space
foobarian 10mo ago
As a developer I took the writer's point to refer to "users" generically, so that even if you work on some internal tools or a backend layer, you still have users who have to use your app or consume your API and there is a lot of learning possible if you communicate and understand them better.
bitexploder 10mo ago
There is a lot of nuance to their point. They are saying, in the long run, career wise, focusing on the actual user matters and makes your projects better. Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. More that, if you follow the user what you are doing can be grounded and it makes your project way more likely to succeed. I would even argue that in many cases it bucks the trend. The author even pointed out, in essence there is a graveyard of internal projects that failed to last because they seemed cool but did nothing for the user.
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  > Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. Interesting, so he was not, contrary to the blog title, writing on the basis of his 14 years of experience at Google?
  - bitexploder 10mo ago
    Read their point 1 carefully. They are saying, when you are building something or trying to solve a problem (for internal or external users) if you follow the user obsessively you will have a far better outcome that aligns with having impact and long term success. This does imply thinking about UX, but transitively, IMO.
    - hansmayer 10mo ago
      I am not sure I follow - is he, or is he not, writing about his experiences from 14 years at Google? The title suggests he does, yet you suggest that he does not?
      - d0gbread 10mo ago
        His learnings from 14 years at Google. Surely we've all learned things working for employers or with engineers that don't do a thing well. In 14 years he probably also experienced great engineers come and go and start other successful businesses they very likely did not run exactly like Google.
lostlogin 10mo ago
> Every single one of their services is a pain to use Would you like to sign in to Google?
sfmike 10mo ago
I see it differently then UX at all. I find the need for better customer support 1000x more pertinent to helping users.
kmoser 10mo ago
> Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX. Clicking the email address brings up a menu with options for other actions, which presumably get used more often. If, instead, you right-click the email address, the option to edit it is right there (last item on the bottom, "Change email address"). I don't see this as a huge penalty given that, as you said, it's rarely used. There's also the "X" to the right of the email address, which you can use to delete it entirely, no extra clicks required.
- hansmayer 10mo ago
  > I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX Luckily for both you and me, we dont have to rely on our feelings of what is good UX or not. There are concrete UX metholodogies such as Hierarchical Task Analysis or Heuristic Evaluation. These allow us to evaluate concrete KPIs, such as number of steps and levels of navigation required for an action, in order to evaluate just how good or bad (or better said, complicated a UX design is). Lets say we apply the HTA. Starting from the top of your navigation level when you want to execute the task, count the number of operations and various levels of navigation you have to go through with the new design, compared to just clicking and correcting the e-mail address in-place? How much time does it take you to write your e-mail in the both cases? How many times do you have to switch back and forth between the main interface and the context menu google kindly placed for us? Now, phase out of your e-mail writing window and evaluate how many various actions you can execute in the Google Workspace. Most of them are likely to have a few quirks like this. Now multiply the estimated number of actions with the number of quirks and you will slowly start to see the immense cognitive load the average user has to face in using, or shall I rather say "combating" the google products' UX.
  - jve 10mo ago
    You never reasoned why the UX is there - what other use cases does it solve? perhaps that is more important question here.
sans_souse 10mo ago
To me; point #3 is the big one and it is in conflict with point #1
- d0gbread 10mo ago
  How so? Those two together is literally agile; not as I've seen it done, but as it's intended. Learn, iterate, repeat.
inopinatus 10mo ago
To be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google. “Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble.
- nabbed 10mo ago
  I was going post exactly this! He was talking about those engineers that really exemplified, from his point of view, good engineers. And dealing with engineering managers that didn't see much use in such activity might be part of "figur[ing] out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity".
Hatrix 10mo ago
I'd like YouTube to add a button to stop showing scam ads from people outside my country.
deleted 10mo ago
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seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
Is there a big tech company that actually has good UX, besides maybe Apple?
- d0gbread 10mo ago
  I know Apple has a reputation for good UX but I think it's carry over from a different era and it's trending down. I bought my kid an iPad for Christmas and set up parental controls, then could not disable it without another iPad (which I don't have). There are many forum threads concluding you just have to factory reset. I couldn't believe how many little unintuitive things I bumped into setting it up.
wdr1 10mo ago
> I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much It depends on how you define "suck." When Google first launched it's homepage, its emptiness (just a logo & search box) was a stark contrast to the portal pages popular, which were loaded with content. Some thought the Google homepage "sucked" whereas other liked it. (I was in the latter.) Likewise, the interface for Gmail. Or the interface for Google Maps. Or the interface for Chrome.
- varjag 10mo ago
  I remember when Google appeared and literally can't recall anyone who thought it sucked. There statistically have to be some people who hated it. But everyone I knew was either on dial-up or low bitrate leased line and it was impossible to dislike that design.
  - wdr1 10mo ago
    I remember it too! But not everyone was on dial-up. A lot were in dorms w/ (for the time) high speed connections or workplaces with it. Remember at the time it wasn't clear that search was going to be the dominate pattern for how people found information on the web. It seems crazy now, but in the early days of the web, the space was small enough that a directory-style approach worked pretty well. It was Yahoo's directory that made it initially popular, not its search. And so there was a fair bit of debate on which was better -- something like a directory + search (a la Yahoo!) vs just search. It took a bit of time before search proved if it was done really well, you didn't need a directory.
deepsun 10mo ago
> very single one of their services is a pain to use Uhm, no? Google Cloud Platform is way more convenient to use than AWS, the IAM is way better designed, and documentation is leagues ahead of AWS.
inglor 10mo ago
Addy's users have been developers and Google has been very responsive in the past. I was usually able to get a hold of someone from teams I needed from Chrome DevTools and they've assisted open source projects like Node.js where Google doesn't have a stake. He also has a blog, books and often attended conferences to speak to users directly when it aligned with his role. I agree about the general Google criticism but I believe it's unjustified in this particular (admittedly rare) case.
shultays 10mo ago
Probably the users he is talking about are not the end users like you and me. It is one team using the tools/software of the other team and so "users" for that other team are the members of the first team.
deleted 10mo ago
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bschmidt25012 10mo ago
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cyberrock 10mo ago
I think your particular Gmail issue exists because they want mobile web and touch screen web users (there are dozens of us!) to be able to tap the recipient to show the user card, like hover does for mouse users. To support your usecase (click to directly edit recipient), touch, click, and hover need to have different actions, which may upset some other users. Unless you mean double click to edit, which I would support. I save my energy for more heinous UX changes. For example, the YouTube comment chyron has spoiled so many videos for me and is just so generally obnoxious.

embedding-shape 10mo ago

> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users It's worth noting that Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users. It might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company.

hansmayer 10mo ago
Ah, I see. I did notice it looked a bit too long-winded and fluffy for a developer-written text.
vcsuspect 10mo ago
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drewda 10mo ago
Fair point. "User" as developer rather than "user" as person clicking buttons in Gmail, Google Maps, etc, etc
- luckylion 10mo ago
  I think that's more "this sounds great" than "our users are developers". Google's services also aren't aimed at developers, the APIs are often very bureaucratic and not very well done (there's no way to list the available google sheets documents in the sheets api, I need the drive API and a different set of permissions? please.) It reads exactly like what you'd expect from a "I want to be considered a thought leader" person: nothing you haven't read a hundred times but it sounds nice so you can nod along.
techsystems 10mo ago
>Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer Oh
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  That's not a fair reading, he's as much of a developer as anyone else. But he wasn't (AFAIK) working on user-facing products specifically.
  - alemanek 10mo ago
    I think it is more the point that the users for his job were external developers. The role is inherently user facing and user focused. I don’t think anyone was trying to say he wasn’t a developer just that his job wasn’t to directly develop products
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      Yeah, I guess I just wanted to add that because of the way that quote was cut at the end, made me believe that the person quoting me thought Osmani "isn't a developer".
kinlan 10mo ago
I was Addy's manager when he was on Developer Relations. He moved to an engineering manager role on Chrome DevTools many years ago and has recently just moved on to a different team. I don't think it's fair at all to say he's not a developer working on a product shipped to users when he led one of our most used developer tools, as well as worked on many of our developer libraries prior to moving to the Engineering manager role.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Yeah, maybe I should have been more precise, I meant "end users like your mom" rather than "not real users". Developing for developers, in a engineering-heavy team is obviously different than the typical product-development team.

steve-atx-7600 10mo ago

You can learn something at a company by observing it’s weaknesses as well as strengths

RamblingCTO 10mo ago

And material UI is still the worst of all UIs. Had the pleasure of rolling out a production oauth client ... jesus christ. Only worse is microsoft in UX. You don't want me to use your services, do you?

embedding-shape 10mo ago
> And material UI is still the worst of all UIs I'm not sure how that got approved either, but at least we now know what would happen if a massive corporation created a UI/UX toolkit, driven only by quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight. Really is the peak of the "data-driven decisions above all" era.
- andrekandre 10mo ago
  > quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight the root of all evil right there...
- RamblingCTO 10mo ago
  What makes me wonder even more: why is this still in place? Someone must've noticed themselves when using it

websiteapi 10mo ago

which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary

addaon 10mo ago
Omni Group. Wolfram. Parts of Apple. Rhino3D. Parts of Breville. Prusa (on device, not on desktop). Speed Queen (dial-based). Just from applications I currently have open and devices I can see from where I'm sitting.
- websiteapi 10mo ago
  I mean something that has a clear Google analog/equivalent that way can compare on. I personally think Wolfram Alpha (assuming that's what you're talking about) isn't any better than Google.
  - addaon 10mo ago
    Never really used Alpha, was talking about Mathematica. I don’t the the web is compatible with good UX, but that doesn’t mean good UX isn’t possible — it just means that the companies that are successful at UX build native applications, or physical objects, or both.
ajross 10mo ago
No one's. Everyone sucks. Find a product and you'll find a population collating complaints about it. Whining about interface design is like the cheapest form of shared currency in our subculture. Fundamentally it's a bikeshed effect. Complaining about hard features like performance is likely to get you in trouble if you aren't actually doing the leg work to measure it and/or expert enough to shout down the people who show up to argue. But UI paradigms are inherently squishy and subjective, so you get to grouse without consequences.
drnick1 10mo ago
None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware. For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.

Aurornis 10mo ago

The short answer is that the UI isn’t optimized for users like you. I haven’t worked for Google specifically, but at this scale everything gets tested and optimized. I would guess they know power users like you are frustrated, but they know you’ll figure it out anyway. So the UX is optimized for a simpler target audience and possibly even for simpler help documents, not to ensure power users can get things done as quickly as possible.

dtech 10mo ago
I feel like you're giving too much credit here. I don't know if it was a leak or an urban legend, but I remember the awful win 8 "flat boxes UI" being that way because it could be designed by managers in PowerPoint that way
rustystump 10mo ago
This is almost certainly not the case. The larger the company the more change is viewed as a negative. Yes people may hold titles to do the things you describe but none are empowered to make change.
hansmayer 10mo ago
The specific feature in question...there is nothing "power" about it. It was a non-feature for decades essentially, I dont recall ever not being able to simply change an e-mail address by moving the cursor and typing in something else. How on earth is this something tested and optimised, for whom exactly?
Yizahi 10mo ago
Google UI seemingly is optimized for happy path cases. Search for the obvious word and click a relevant link on the screen which appears. Write a single response to a single email and abandon than conversation afterwards, always use new conversations for every new email. Click a recommended video thumbnail on the frontpage and then continue with autoplay. Put only short defined text type in the cells of a spreadsheet, like date/number/text etc. And so on with all of their products. But as soon as user tries to search for something no on the first page, or reply to a 10-20+ message thread with attachments in history, or tries to use playlists or search in YT, or input a slightly more complex data in the sheet cells - then all hell breaks loose. Just the latest Google thing I've experienced - a default system Watch Later playlist is now hidden on Android. It's gone, no traces, no way to search for it. The only remnant of it is a 2-second popup after adding a new video to Watch Later, you can press "view" and then see it. Meanwhile it is still present as a separate item on PC. I'm writing this eaxmple because that was deliberate, that was no error or regression. Someone created a Jira for that and someone resolved it.

ignoramous 10mo ago

> wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse UX? Google doesn't even bother helping folks locked out of their Gmail accounts. For people who use Android (some 3bn), that's like a digital death sentence, with real-world consequences. It is almost comical that anyone would think Google is customer-focused, but might if they were being paid handsomely to think otherwise, all the while drinking a lot of kool-aid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024754 The top comment there is from a Xoogler which sums it up nicely: The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people. Companies love the benefits that come from scale, like having a billion people use their service, but they never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it :( Google rakes in $100bn a quarter; that's $1bn every day.

hansmayer 10mo ago
That is a great point too. For a company which effectively does not have a customer service, how can they claim to be obsessing about helping users at all?
stefanfisk 10mo ago
Hell, in my experience they often don’t even help ad customers that are having issues that prevent them from buying ads.
omnifischer 10mo ago
And how are they supposed to do it if users did not add proper 2FA (and backup those recovery keys)? Even banks are struggling to authenticate folks. For a longtime in EU people with 3rd world passports cannot create accounts easily. Google cannot connect identity of a person to email address easily. Or they need to create CS - that will authenticate passports? And hundreds of countries, stolen IDs? Nay. > The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people > never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it Same thing with govts. If you go to driver license. passport or any govt office then there will one person with some strange issue.

dijit 10mo ago

> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much Ok, I mean this sincerely. You must never have used Microsoft tools. They managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX. Azure? Teams? PowerBI? It's a total joke compared to even the most gnarly of google services (or FOSS tools, like Gerrit).

hansmayer 10mo ago
I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.
- ghaff 10mo ago
  There was also MSDN. But it was also a different world at the time.
- datadrivenangel 10mo ago
  With continuous delivery and access to preview and beta features, the documentation is fragmented and scattered and half of it technically is for the previous version of the product with a different name but still mostly works because microsoft can't finish modernizing most software... And the customer support is not great until you start really paying the big bucks for it.
- dijit 10mo ago
  > If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. But even then, contemporaries outclassed Microsoft by a lot. It was culture back then to provide printed user manuals, I still have some from Sun Microsystems because it was the best resource I found to learn how storage appliances should work and the technical trade-offs of them.

jwr 10mo ago

I was also surprised to read this. I have terrible problems with all Google UIs. I can never find anything and it's an exercise in frustration to get anywhere.

gniv 10mo ago

I have an issue with the first point as well, but differently. Having worked on a user-facing product with millions of users, the challenge was not finding user problems, but finding frequent user problems. In a sufficiently complex product there are thousands of different issues that users encounter. But it's non-trivial to know what to prioritize.

mike_hearn 10mo ago

> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock" When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was: • Almost nobody else in engineering did this. • I was considered weird for doing it. • It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees. • An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic. • The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring. In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly. This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.

p1esk 10mo ago
Almost nobody else in engineering did this. What you described is the job of a product manager. Are there no PMs at Google?
- Xorlev 10mo ago

Bombthecat 10mo ago

It's not just Google, the UX is degrading in... Well everything. I think it's because companies are in a duopole, monopole etc position. They only do what the numbers tell them. Nothing else and UX just does not matter anymore. It's like those gacha which make billions. Terrible games, almost zero depth, but people spend thousands in them. Not because they are good, but because they don't have much choice ( similar game without gacha) and part the game loop is made for addiction and build around numbers.

Terr_ 10mo ago
To offer some additional causes for the degradation of UX: 1. An increasing part of industry profits started coming from entertainment (or worse, psychological exploitation) instead of selling the customer a useful tool. For example, good budgeting-software has to help the user understand and model and achieve a goal, while a "good" slot-machine may benefit from confusion and distraction and a giant pull-handle. 2. "Must work on a touchscreen that fits in a pocket" support drags certain things to a lowest common denominator. 3. UX as a switching-cost for customers has started happening more on a per-product rather than a per-OS basis. Instead of learning the Windows or Mac "way" of screens and shortcuts, individual programs--especially those dang Electron apps--make their own reinventions of the wheel.

whyagaindavid 10mo ago

This is definitely an edge case. Most UI/UX from Google is very consistent and just works. Otherwise they won't be in this market. Only UI/UX issue is that most experienced users want to not adapt to change. It is like people always telling Windows 7 is the best. Don't keep reinventing. Another one that irks me is every UI/UX dev assumes people have 2 x 4K monitors and menu items overflow.

hansmayer 10mo ago
> Only UI/UX issue is that most experienced users want to not adapt to change Users will not only adapt, but will even champion your changes if they make sense to said users. For example the web checkout or to name a more drastic example, iPhone and fingers as user interface devices. Once you start convincing the users that the interface is great, but they are too resistant to changes/dumb/uncreative to know how use it... its a different story I´d reckon ;)

lkjdsklf 10mo ago

I think the UX issues you’re describing are less related to culture changes in companies and more just in the industry in general UX are designed by and for people who don’t really use computers. They use mobile devices and tablets It’s an industry wide phenomenon

hansmayer 10mo ago
You are onto something there, if you mean, the design roles being taken over by the people who are not techies - like the POs. But if you just refer to UX being designed for mobile devices - that is not an excuse for an even worse UX on the mobile. If anything I would have expected more effort put in there, given how many more issues the limited screen estate can cause...
- lkjdsklf 10mo ago
  It’s designed for virtual keyboards rather than real ones That makes a bigger difference than screen space

foobarian 10mo ago

As a developer I took the writer's point to refer to "users" generically, so that even if you work on some internal tools or a backend layer, you still have users who have to use your app or consume your API and there is a lot of learning possible if you communicate and understand them better.

bitexploder 10mo ago

There is a lot of nuance to their point. They are saying, in the long run, career wise, focusing on the actual user matters and makes your projects better. Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. More that, if you follow the user what you are doing can be grounded and it makes your project way more likely to succeed. I would even argue that in many cases it bucks the trend. The author even pointed out, in essence there is a graveyard of internal projects that failed to last because they seemed cool but did nothing for the user.

hansmayer 10mo ago
> Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. Interesting, so he was not, contrary to the blog title, writing on the basis of his 14 years of experience at Google?
- bitexploder 10mo ago
  Read their point 1 carefully. They are saying, when you are building something or trying to solve a problem (for internal or external users) if you follow the user obsessively you will have a far better outcome that aligns with having impact and long term success. This does imply thinking about UX, but transitively, IMO.
  - hansmayer 10mo ago
    I am not sure I follow - is he, or is he not, writing about his experiences from 14 years at Google? The title suggests he does, yet you suggest that he does not?
    - d0gbread 10mo ago
      His learnings from 14 years at Google. Surely we've all learned things working for employers or with engineers that don't do a thing well. In 14 years he probably also experienced great engineers come and go and start other successful businesses they very likely did not run exactly like Google.

lostlogin 10mo ago

> Every single one of their services is a pain to use Would you like to sign in to Google?

sfmike 10mo ago

I see it differently then UX at all. I find the need for better customer support 1000x more pertinent to helping users.

kmoser 10mo ago

> Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX. Clicking the email address brings up a menu with options for other actions, which presumably get used more often. If, instead, you right-click the email address, the option to edit it is right there (last item on the bottom, "Change email address"). I don't see this as a huge penalty given that, as you said, it's rarely used. There's also the "X" to the right of the email address, which you can use to delete it entirely, no extra clicks required.

hansmayer 10mo ago
> I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX Luckily for both you and me, we dont have to rely on our feelings of what is good UX or not. There are concrete UX metholodogies such as Hierarchical Task Analysis or Heuristic Evaluation. These allow us to evaluate concrete KPIs, such as number of steps and levels of navigation required for an action, in order to evaluate just how good or bad (or better said, complicated a UX design is). Lets say we apply the HTA. Starting from the top of your navigation level when you want to execute the task, count the number of operations and various levels of navigation you have to go through with the new design, compared to just clicking and correcting the e-mail address in-place? How much time does it take you to write your e-mail in the both cases? How many times do you have to switch back and forth between the main interface and the context menu google kindly placed for us? Now, phase out of your e-mail writing window and evaluate how many various actions you can execute in the Google Workspace. Most of them are likely to have a few quirks like this. Now multiply the estimated number of actions with the number of quirks and you will slowly start to see the immense cognitive load the average user has to face in using, or shall I rather say "combating" the google products' UX.
- jve 10mo ago
  You never reasoned why the UX is there - what other use cases does it solve? perhaps that is more important question here.

sans_souse 10mo ago

To me; point #3 is the big one and it is in conflict with point #1

d0gbread 10mo ago
How so? Those two together is literally agile; not as I've seen it done, but as it's intended. Learn, iterate, repeat.

inopinatus 10mo ago

To be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google. “Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble.

nabbed 10mo ago
I was going post exactly this! He was talking about those engineers that really exemplified, from his point of view, good engineers. And dealing with engineering managers that didn't see much use in such activity might be part of "figur[ing] out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity".

Hatrix 10mo ago

I'd like YouTube to add a button to stop showing scam ads from people outside my country.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

seanmcdirmid 10mo ago

Is there a big tech company that actually has good UX, besides maybe Apple?

d0gbread 10mo ago
I know Apple has a reputation for good UX but I think it's carry over from a different era and it's trending down. I bought my kid an iPad for Christmas and set up parental controls, then could not disable it without another iPad (which I don't have). There are many forum threads concluding you just have to factory reset. I couldn't believe how many little unintuitive things I bumped into setting it up.

wdr1 10mo ago

> I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much It depends on how you define "suck." When Google first launched it's homepage, its emptiness (just a logo & search box) was a stark contrast to the portal pages popular, which were loaded with content. Some thought the Google homepage "sucked" whereas other liked it. (I was in the latter.) Likewise, the interface for Gmail. Or the interface for Google Maps. Or the interface for Chrome.

varjag 10mo ago
I remember when Google appeared and literally can't recall anyone who thought it sucked. There statistically have to be some people who hated it. But everyone I knew was either on dial-up or low bitrate leased line and it was impossible to dislike that design.
- wdr1 10mo ago
  I remember it too! But not everyone was on dial-up. A lot were in dorms w/ (for the time) high speed connections or workplaces with it. Remember at the time it wasn't clear that search was going to be the dominate pattern for how people found information on the web. It seems crazy now, but in the early days of the web, the space was small enough that a directory-style approach worked pretty well. It was Yahoo's directory that made it initially popular, not its search. And so there was a fair bit of debate on which was better -- something like a directory + search (a la Yahoo!) vs just search. It took a bit of time before search proved if it was done really well, you didn't need a directory.

deepsun 10mo ago

> very single one of their services is a pain to use Uhm, no? Google Cloud Platform is way more convenient to use than AWS, the IAM is way better designed, and documentation is leagues ahead of AWS.

inglor 10mo ago

Addy's users have been developers and Google has been very responsive in the past. I was usually able to get a hold of someone from teams I needed from Chrome DevTools and they've assisted open source projects like Node.js where Google doesn't have a stake. He also has a blog, books and often attended conferences to speak to users directly when it aligned with his role. I agree about the general Google criticism but I believe it's unjustified in this particular (admittedly rare) case.

shultays 10mo ago

Probably the users he is talking about are not the end users like you and me. It is one team using the tools/software of the other team and so "users" for that other team are the members of the first team.

deleted 10mo ago

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bschmidt25012 10mo ago

[dead]

cyberrock 10mo ago

I think your particular Gmail issue exists because they want mobile web and touch screen web users (there are dozens of us!) to be able to tap the recipient to show the user card, like hover does for mouse users. To support your usecase (click to directly edit recipient), touch, click, and hover need to have different actions, which may upset some other users. Unless you mean double click to edit, which I would support. I save my energy for more heinous UX changes. For example, the YouTube comment chyron has spoiled so many videos for me and is just so generally obnoxious.