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The problem is that they're not unifying their services well. In UX discussions this always comes up as one that sucks. Basically the Google UX, to me, is "He

The problem is that they're not unifying their services well. In UX discussions this always comes up as one that sucks. Basically the Google UX, to me, is "Here's a bunch of stuff that we have. Good luck!" They need to seriously put the unifying UX of their entire brand from end-to-end as their top priority, so that you go to Google and can actually use what they offer in a cohesive way, instead of with piecemeal walled-off divisions of inconsistency. It's a huge problem to be sure, and there's no easy solution. This blog post is just a description of one annoying symptom. Meanwhile, what Google thinks of as good UX these days is removing features from their already minimal individual products. See: New Maps; Gmail New Compose. Their priorities are upside-down and I have no confidence they can turn their ship around...

scholia 13y ago
Plus, it's very hard to tell if a feature has been _removed_ or just hidden away where you're unlikely to find it. The core of the Google UI at the moment is: "Hey, move your mouse around the screen or just click somewhere and maybe something useful will slide out from where we've hidden it!" I exaggerate, but only slightly....
- nitrogen 13y ago
  I exaggerate, but only slightly.... If anything, you're understating the frustration of the new GMail compose UI. My browser window hasn't gotten any smaller, but the amount of important information displayed at any given time by GMail continues to decrease. "Oh, you don't really need to see who you're sending this e-mail to, nor could you possibly care whether they're a To:, CC:, or BCC:, so we'll just hide them all behind a single line." "While we're at it, we'll make you use your mouse to see what formatting and linking options are available. Never mind that they're always in the same place, we just feel like hiding them from you, you know, to watch your mouse squirm!" "As an added bonus, we'll move the cursor back to the top of your composed text when our silly algorithm decides to unhide the quoted text! For free!"
  - scholia 13y ago
    Well said! ;-) > Never mind that they're always in the same place Except sometimes they're not. Select an email and "More" shoots over from being the third item in the menu bar to being the seventh. Then there's "Archive" which can either have its own button or magically appear as a dropdown menu item. And so on. Drives me crazy....

scholia 13y ago

Plus, it's very hard to tell if a feature has been _removed_ or just hidden away where you're unlikely to find it. The core of the Google UI at the moment is: "Hey, move your mouse around the screen or just click somewhere and maybe something useful will slide out from where we've hidden it!" I exaggerate, but only slightly....

nitrogen 13y ago
I exaggerate, but only slightly.... If anything, you're understating the frustration of the new GMail compose UI. My browser window hasn't gotten any smaller, but the amount of important information displayed at any given time by GMail continues to decrease. "Oh, you don't really need to see who you're sending this e-mail to, nor could you possibly care whether they're a To:, CC:, or BCC:, so we'll just hide them all behind a single line." "While we're at it, we'll make you use your mouse to see what formatting and linking options are available. Never mind that they're always in the same place, we just feel like hiding them from you, you know, to watch your mouse squirm!" "As an added bonus, we'll move the cursor back to the top of your composed text when our silly algorithm decides to unhide the quoted text! For free!"
- scholia 13y ago
  Well said! ;-) > Never mind that they're always in the same place Except sometimes they're not. Select an email and "More" shoots over from being the third item in the menu bar to being the seventh. Then there's "Archive" which can either have its own button or magically appear as a dropdown menu item. And so on. Drives me crazy....