8 ms·
Google seems to have started on a mission to annoy the fuck out of me the past 6 months or so. For instance through the neverending popups and dialogs that ent
by bborud 13y ago
Google seems to have started on a mission to annoy the fuck out of me the past 6 months or so. For instance through the neverending popups and dialogs that enthusiastically tell me about some feature and require a response from me to ask them to please fuck off.
Not to talk about the amazingly stupid animations on Google+ that makes it impossible to scroll fast on an iPhone 4. I was making an effort to use Google+ more ... and then Google gives me that shit.
Look Googlers, I know that you suffered under the reign of the Cupcake Princess and were unable to release anything cool because dealing with her was more painful than watching an entire episode of Sex and the City. I know that. But that doesn't mean you have to go out of your fucking way to add frivolous, pointless, wankery to your UIs.
If you want to do something productive: fix the Gmail UI.
- bittired 13y ago> fix the Gmail UI. They just tried recently. I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors (free, large, mostly reliable). My ISP (which is a major one) sucks at mail compared to Google.
- stopcodon 13y ago>tried I waited 2 hours for an email yesterday only to find it hidden in a new "Promotions" tab instead of my inbox, which meant it didn't get pushed to my phone for some reason.
- freehunter 13y agoMan, waiting on Steam Guard to send me an email with a confirmation code got pretty hairy during some of the recent sales. When there's 15 minutes left to say 75% on a game I really want and the confirmation email gets sent to Promotions and therefore never seen... thanks Gmail.
- slouch 13y agoIf you click the + on the right and uncheck everything it goes back to the old inbox.
- freehunter 13y agoWhich really only becomes necessary after something has happened to make you need to switch back, at which point it's too late. The better solution is for developers to not release updates that forcibly change your already-configured settings.
- xjtian 13y agoFor the iOS gmail app you can choose to be notified for all new mail or "primary" only. I'm not sure about using a built-in client like the Mail app though.
- mcdougle 13y agoI immediately turned that feature off the other day when they added it. Google -- I can organize my own email, thank you very much.
- bborud 13y agoSpam made me give up running my own mail server and start using Gmail. Gmail is slowly making me give up email altogether. I am not saying that email perfect and doesn't need innovation, but there should be greater sensitivity towards complexity and friction on Google's part. It is bad enough already that various functions are spread semi-randomly around in different buttons, drop-downs and links so you have to click around to get things done. There's really no need to try to get too clever about things. I'd like more predictable behavior ("where did that email I looked at just 5 minutes ago end up?") and I would really like a better filtering system. They should have a look at the scoring system in Gnus and then think long and hard about how you build a sensible UI atop that kind of expressive power.
- bborud 13y agoIf you fast-forward the evolution of the GMail interface it is like watching a drab green Jeep being turned into a chromed Jeepney. Complete with three tiers of honking-subsystems, 18kW worth of blinkenlights and a whole dash full of Virgin Mary bobble heads. But mind you: the rims on the thing have a carefully selected hue of blue that was found among 39 others to be the one hue that gave the best ct rate on ads, so it isn't like the process was random or anything. I have a very simple test for product usability: it must not confuse the hell out of my parents. Gmail makes my parents shot profanities at the computer. Test failed. (Okay, there I probably managed to offend at least one ethnic group, one religion and I said something that is almost certainly ageist. Feel free to be offended while I shall busy myself not giving a fuck)
- masnick 13y ago> I'd like to stop using GMail, but there aren't worthy competitors I wrote this a few days ago...it spent some time on the front page here at HN: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ FastMail isn't free, which is a plus in my book (clear business model not involving ads). It is comparable or better than Gmail in all the other ways that matter to me. See my post for more details.
- untilHellbanned 13y agolove how ranting like this is top comment but if this were Dropbox/Airbnb you'd get hellbanned
- eitland 13y agoMaybe because to most of us Dropbox and Airbnb isn't even close to being as annoying as Google? (som of us where enthusiastic google fanboys earlier.)
- bborud 13y agoI'm still a Google fanboy. Most of what they do is better than what the competition does. But there seems to have been a pendulum-effect with regard to UX that I do not particularly care for.
- pron 13y agoOK, I'm not usually like this -- perhaps this time is just because I didn't know who the "cupcake princess" is and had to Google it out of curiosity, and trust me, I think Google is the epitome of the power hungry, sinister, duplicitous corporation, that makes the robber barons look like no more than slightly annoyed kindergarten teachers -- but I think you're being sexist. Anyway, I found this: "Mayer, a long-time Google executive dubbed the “cupcake princess” after she constructed detailed spreadsheets weighing up the benefits of various cupcake recipes". Now, compiling cupcake spreadsheets, is, uhhh, frivolous maybe? But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male executives at software companies do the same for beer; or bikes; or Star Wars. I don't think they get such nicknames. Anyway, there's an unpleasant bro scent to your comment. If we care about our freedom and independent agency, the Google corporation must be broken up, and sooner rather than later. But even the largest heap of banal evil in the known universe can be dealt with without unnecessary bigotry.
- bborud 13y agoThe remark was not intended to be sexist. It was intended to reflect that I don't think Mayer was particularly easy to work with, that her elitist values were contrary to much of the Google culture. (That being said: I think she is good CEO material. In fact, when she took over Yahoo! I bought stock in the company). If you really can't imagine that it wasn't a sexist remark then I'm sorry for you: it must be hard to be so easily offended.
- lnanek2 13y agoHaha, I find the ads annoying as well. Sometimes I just want to go read my email and it's a full page ad for some Google product like Wave or Google features I don't want.
- mkr-hn 13y agoI've never seen this in almost a decade of using Gmail.
- duaneb 13y ago> Cupcake Princess Veering dangerously close to sexist behavior there—make an extra effort to think about what you're saying when you talk about women in our field. Regardless of what you think of her, it's demeaning to reduce her from a CEO on par with any male in the industry to a "Cupcake Princess"—LOL, they aren't qualified to lead! Seriously, though, don't be a douchebag, there are more than enough in our industry without this shit leaking onto HN.
- bborud 13y agoYou imply that we can't speak ill of Marissa Mayer because she is a woman. I've had the misfortune of finding myself in several meetings with her to experience first hand that she wasn't a very good VP. Or a very nice person. Or even embodying Google values. On the other hand, I do believe in her as a CEO. I think she is precisely the kind of CEO material Yahoo! needs. I don't think she is VP material. The day Marissa Mayer took over as CEO I sold my Amazon stock and bought Yahoo! stock. And I don't even like her. Now, you, on the other hand, reduce Marissa Mayer to a gender. Someone weak that needs to be protected and treated with care in comment fields. Precisely who is the sexist here?
- bcgraham 13y ago>You imply that we can't speak ill of Marissa Mayer because she is a woman. No, you can speak all the ill of Marissa Mayer you want. Effectively saying, "She's a woman," as a way to speak ill of her is bogus, though. >Now, you, on the other hand, reduce Marissa Mayer to a gender. Someone weak that needs to be protected and treated with care in comment fields. Nobody is being "protected," least of all Marissa Mayer. Women who aren't in the industry because of pervasive sexism obviously can't speak for themselves to combat that sexism, so other people have to do it.
- bborud 13y agoNo, having to double check that whatever I call her is gender-neutral to not offend overly sensitive people who look really hard for sexism, is bogus. And sexist. It fosters the impression that any female professional is a damsel in distress dependent on acts of chivalry from people who go to china and call the people there "asian-american" because they have grown up in a culture where more and more words are dangerous, frightening and forbidden. To be quite honest, I really do not give a damn about your mental hangups and I am truly sorry if I have ever given the impression that I do. But it does bother me when people have the cheek to tell me what I meant when I said something. I know what I meant and when I say that it wasn't meant in a sexist way, then only an idiot would persist in trying to tell me what I meant.
- cmpxchg8 13y agoNot sure what Marissa Mayer has to do with this. But please don't blame an entire company for the decisions of a single person: Vic Gundotra. There's plenty of engineers at Google who feel incredibly frustrated every time one of these decisions is made and remember the good ol' times when Google used to put the user first.
- bborud 13y agoThe remark pointed to the impression that when Mayer left the floodgates opened and lots of UX changes happened. She had been holding things back -- for good and bad. It was very hard to get new things done while she was the gatekeeper for UX. There were a lot of things that didn't work too well when it came to the process of developing the user experience. A big part of which, as far as I could tell, was Mayer's inability to conduct UI reviews in a meaningful manner. I was present at a few of them. It was like attending a meeting being presided over by the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Sadly you wouldn't find many people willing to speak up about it, because that could potentially be Very Bad For Your Career within Google. So people would just tolerate her childish, spoilt behavior. The good thing was that very little frivolous nonsense was shipped. The bad thing was very few positive changes were made as well. So when Mayer was "reallocated" (and eventually resigned) there was all this pent up frustration and pressure to get work done on UX. And I think the pendulum swung a bit too far in the other direction because of it. In the beginning most of the changes that came out were incredibly positive. For instance I think the overall look of Gmail and the move to a flatter overall design was a good thing. But eventually things started to go a bit pear-shaped. For instance I have no idea what made the Google+ people think that the mad scrolling animations was a good idea. I can't imagine how it enhances the experience, and if you are on a smart phone, it is a really slow way of flicking through your feed. Slow is not a Google value. Google products should never be slow. In Google+ I wish they would have focused on usability rather than embellishments. For instance: why the hell is it so awkward to start a hangout on Google+? Why is the UI for this so fucked that it takes people a dozen uses to learn how to do it without mousing around for ages? Seriously, if I were the PM for that product I'd nail down fixing that problem as the top OKR for the next two quarters and focus on getting just that done. Hangouts is the single most useful feature Google+ offers, and the key thing that differentiates it from Facebook; yet the user experience for getting a hangout going between a group of people is fiddly.