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Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it'

by exelius 12y ago

Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products. This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.

untog 12y ago
Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products. Err, no. How does the left version cram more advertising in than the right version here? http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Android-Lollipop-vs-Android-KitKat-11.jpg http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/An...
- wtbob 12y ago
  >> Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. > That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that. That sounds like Unix to me. Seems to work just fine …
  - untog 12y ago
    Yeah, try putting the average smartphone user in front of a Unix terminal and see how that works out.
privong 12y ago
> This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you. I do not think that necessarily follows. Even if you are not the customer, they likely (think they) are designing it for you. Because they need you to keep giving them your data, they need you to find the UI easy to use and easy to hand over data.
- exelius 12y ago
  Data is easy for them to get since, you know, they control the OS behind your phone and will get the data anyway. The new Google Maps UI is fucking custom tailored to showing you advertisements. It's much less useful now for things like driving directions or finding businesses that don't pay for sponsorship (i.e. if I search for "Rite Aid" from my house, it shows me a Rite Aid 3 miles away instead of the one literally 50 feet from my front door.)
  - privong 12y ago
    Those things may be all true, but are unrelated to the point I was responding to, which was your invoking the "if you are not paying for it, you are the customer" meme.
    - exelius 12y ago
      Google was the entire inspiration for the meme. Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising. If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away. [1] https://investor.google.com/pdf/20131231_google_10K.pdf https://investor.google.com/pdf/20131231_google_10K.pdf
      - privong 12y ago
        I know Google was the inspiration for the meme. I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
The underlying problem is dev time gets wasted on cosmetic updates while basic usability issues are ignored. Whatever OS you pick, there are elements that are simply wrong. I have a particular loathing of iTunes for its many persistent idiocies, but I could just as easily pick examples from Windows or Linux world. Designing eye-candy is much easier than designing good application work-flow - and it's the latter that defines the UX. It's baffling that this is either not understood or ignored by so many product managers. Or maybe not - if you research app design books you'll find a huge amount written about coding conventions and ideas like MVC, and quite a lot about HI standards and graphic design, but (relatively) almost nothing about workflow design.

by exelius 12y ago

untog 12y ago

Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products. Err, no. How does the left version cram more advertising in than the right version here? http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Android-Lollipop-vs-Android-KitKat-11.jpg http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/An...

wtbob 12y ago
>> Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. > That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that. That sounds like Unix to me. Seems to work just fine …
- untog 12y ago
  Yeah, try putting the average smartphone user in front of a Unix terminal and see how that works out.

privong 12y ago

> This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you. I do not think that necessarily follows. Even if you are not the customer, they likely (think they) are designing it for you. Because they need you to keep giving them your data, they need you to find the UI easy to use and easy to hand over data.

exelius 12y ago
Data is easy for them to get since, you know, they control the OS behind your phone and will get the data anyway. The new Google Maps UI is fucking custom tailored to showing you advertisements. It's much less useful now for things like driving directions or finding businesses that don't pay for sponsorship (i.e. if I search for "Rite Aid" from my house, it shows me a Rite Aid 3 miles away instead of the one literally 50 feet from my front door.)
- privong 12y ago
  Those things may be all true, but are unrelated to the point I was responding to, which was your invoking the "if you are not paying for it, you are the customer" meme.
  - exelius 12y ago
    Google was the entire inspiration for the meme. Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising. If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away. [1] https://investor.google.com/pdf/20131231_google_10K.pdf https://investor.google.com/pdf/20131231_google_10K.pdf
    - privong 12y ago
      I know Google was the inspiration for the meme. I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

The underlying problem is dev time gets wasted on cosmetic updates while basic usability issues are ignored. Whatever OS you pick, there are elements that are simply wrong. I have a particular loathing of iTunes for its many persistent idiocies, but I could just as easily pick examples from Windows or Linux world. Designing eye-candy is much easier than designing good application work-flow - and it's the latter that defines the UX. It's baffling that this is either not understood or ignored by so many product managers. Or maybe not - if you research app design books you'll find a huge amount written about coding conventions and ideas like MVC, and quite a lot about HI standards and graphic design, but (relatively) almost nothing about workflow design.