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Actually, we care deeply about customer feedback and several of us on the product team read the threads on the product forums personally, especially when there

Actually, we care deeply about customer feedback and several of us on the product team read the threads on the product forums personally, especially when there is vocal feedback. We don't necessarily act on everything, of course. With a product that operates at global scale we have a huge responsibility to make sure we are making optimizations that improve Gmail for as many users as possible, and the only way to do that is to rely on metrics and surveys that capture the entire user base. Otherwise we would be, by definition, changing a UI used by hundreds of millions in response to a vocal, non-representative minority. Basically we use the product forums and social media to figure out of there are trends or issues that we should be concerned about, but then always validate those issues with real data before taking action.

twistedpair 13y ago
Thanks for the reply Jason. Many of the movements of the Google properties have been toward the light over the last two years and it certainly is a very difficult task for the Google peeps. Props to them. Alas, as a keen WebApp dev myself, I have found myself having to Google for how to do tasks I once did easily. Such searches eventually uncover the highly counter intuitive means to do the previously simple thing (via someone's blog post), or reveal that the feature has been dropped from the new and improved version. Such issues are not a subjective matter of color choice or icon design, but the reduction of functionality and confounding of user interaction. Largely Google wins the efforts to improve their products, but I've seen a half dozen such failings in the last year that I am surprised managed to ship. Hopefully their batting average continues to improve.