I used to work at Google, as an engineering director on the Chrome Mobile team. While I agree that the UX of many Google products needs fixing, it's not just a simple matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces."<p>The article misses a really important point that you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback. Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX as much as they like, but even changing something minor in Gmail or Google Docs impacts orders of magnitude more people, using the product in such a huge number of environments -- phones, tablets, PCs -- in every language and every corner of the world. Every time Google has tried to make a major UX change -- look at Inbox, for example -- the challenges of bringing all of the existing users over to the new experience are very real. As a result, the UX tends to evolve in smaller steps, which (of course) results in the final result being more of a hodgepodge than you would get if you just started from scratch.<p>Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers. These people know how to design good user experiences and care very much about the end result. But there is the reality of being boxed into design decisions that are difficult to undo without making some really major changes that are highly disruptive. Now, you could just say that Google should bite the bullet and hit reboot on some of its bad UX decisions from years ago. That is always an option, but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.
This is one of the most content-vacant articles I've seen on HN lately.<p>- <i>"Google Is Getting Left Behind Due to Horrible UI/UX"</i>: provides exactly zero statistics relating to declining Google usage.<p>- <i>"What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?"</i>: provides zero screenshots or even textual descriptions of whatever it is these competitors have that Google should just copy.<p>- <i>"How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?"</i> I guess the words "completely" and "obsoleted" have no meaning?
This is the local maxima problem. Any company that relies heavily on A/B testing suffers this problem. I know Netflix had/has this problem.<p>You try out a bunch of changes, and one of them makes a slight uptick in the metric you're tracking. So you implement that change and kill all the other experiments, instead of iterating on the other ideas to see if you can get them to do <i>even better</i> than the current winner.<p>Apple didn't used to suffer from this problem, because Steve Jobs didn't care about data if something bothered him. He'd just have it changed, and he happened to have good taste. Johnny Ive tried to do the same, but his taste was hit or miss, so now they have a conglomeration of taste and data made interfaces.<p>Google is 100% data made interfaces. From what I understand, their PMs have <i>no</i> leeway to go against the data. At least at most companies the PM can still make a decision against the data, and as long as they can justify it with user studies or something else they can move ahead.<p>Data can tell us a lot of things, but it can't tell us everything.
As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets:<p>- Well <i>I</i> think it looks great.<p>- Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means)<p>- We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good.<p>Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.<p>The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle.<p>If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."
A lifetime ago, I worked for Yahoo! well after Google had won the war. That office was full of talented, thoughtful, and energetic PMs...and a middle-management layer so thick that nothing ever got done.<p>You'd propose new ideas, new products, new interfaces and it would just get so bogged down in the process. And invariably those talented people would leave for greener pastures, leaving behind those who were just there for a paycheck or because that was the best they could do, and things got incrementally worse.<p>Lots of excuses were made: our users don't like change, we need to hit quarterly numbers, have we thoroughly tested this, and on and on. And what happens? You get something that looks Yahoo! Mail.<p>It happened to AOL, it happened to Yahoo!, it's happening currently to Google, and will happen to Facebook, Twitter, and so on.
Besides the terrible UX I’d say Google is getting left behind due to the virtually zero improvement in its apps over the last decade.<p>Started using Google Drive for work in around 2011 and stopped last year when I moved to a Microsoft-based company. In that time it didn’t seem like there were any major improvements in functionality to the core Drive, Docs and Sheets (and poor, forgotten Draw) apps. In fact most changes made things worse.<p>Drive’s search is so poor that it’s often easier to get a colleague to resend the invite to a doc than it is find the thing via search.<p>Docs is pretty much stagnant, with the only noticeable new feature being the section navigator on the side.<p>Gmail went from being a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of web technologies to a bloated, over-JavaScripted hog that takes ages to load.<p>Chat services came and went but none of them were particularly better than their predecessors. Just a slightly different arrangement of deckchairs.<p>It’s amazing that Google have left room for competitors like Airtable, Notion and Miro to both flourish and fulfil some of Google docs’ early promise.
I usually think these "Google is the worst" posts are over the top, but I genuinely find Gmail's mobile interface bewildering. There are two three-dot/ellipsis icons when you read an email and after using mobile Gmail for years I have no idea which actions are in which. "Move to Inbox": upper icon. "Add star": lower icon. "Mark important": upper icon. "Mark unread": lower icon. I'm sure there's some explanation or at least mnemonic but I'm lost.
Google Drive UI makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Even on non-mobile devices obvious actions and behaviours are made impossible. Want to open a new tab for every folder in Drive? Tough luck, you can't use middle click nor "Open in new tab" since it's some poorly made abomination without respect for the user. So you need to go back, but it's a large folder and will never load folders in one go, so you have to scroll down again and spend 5 seconds for the animations to end and load the next dozen elements. Just one of the many things personally annoying me, and it's not limited to it alone but all Google services, they are definitely among the worst I've ever had to deal with when it comes to usability.
I remember a period of time when it seemed like Evernote was going surge past all the other cloud-document providers. They seemed to be doing everything right. Then they sputtered out. I still pay for Evernote because ... they're holding a huge amount of my old notes that I don't quite know how to get out. But I never add anything new to Evernote.<p>I could tell a similar story about Notion, though it is newer. While Evernote doesn't give you enough affordances, instead almost forcing you do use its internal search for everything, Notion gives you far too many affordances, leading to a tendency to create monstrous, unusable systems where information goes to die. Also, it is slow.<p>Google Docs, on the other hand, has been a consistent workhorse for both my personal and professional needs ever since its inception. Google Docs does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. In Google Drive, you move a Doc file around the way you would move a file around on your computer. Docs/Drive have never lost data due to a sync issue, or left me confused about where a file went. I like this. I want it to stay this way.<p>As for the UX on the Google Analytics ... yeah, the Facebook Ads interface is also completely opaque. I feel like this class of products is being optimized for something other than the feeling of transparency, and is instead cultivating particular workflows used by power users.
The UI is fine. Seriously folks - get a grip.<p>That said, there is no question that things rot at google.<p>One thing other companies do but google does not - listen to customers just a bit.<p>My favorite is of course, google home can't get gsuite calendars, but I can setup alexa to get them fine (so whatever technical / secuirty argument there might be doesn't really hold).<p>This has been a top request for years? I wouldn't be surprised if it turns into a decade. Zero action.<p>This is just throughout things - they do the 90% solution, and WILL NOT touch the 10% you stub your toes on. If they just would tweak and fix a few things ANNUALLY they'd be very competitive.
The new icons for their apps on Android are terribad. They are all the same colors. Now the photos app icon looks the same as the maps app icon, which causes me to confuse the two when I only give a quick glance. Gmail used to be red, now I have trouble finding it among all their other crap.<p>WTF Google???
It feels like Google has never really truly cared about UI. They seem to grok UX, but the aesthetics always drift towards the geekier side of user interface design.<p>This isn't to say they don't have lots of user interface designers, or that they don't get branding. It's that they lack a modern creative direction vision that connects those two functions.
Honestly, I feel that google just stopped caring about most of their consumer software several years ago.<p>Compare googles suite to office 365, and it just doesn't even compare, I use to hate microsoft, but as time has gone on, they have continued to modernize and update and add meaningful features.<p>Where googles UI continues to let their product rot on the vine, add and drop products at a rate that they can't be trusted to build a business workflow around.<p>and good luck getting support, the brilliant idea of having support options locked behind your account login, shows its weakness when your are locked out of an account and realize you have no meaningful way to get help.<p>Basically, I feel like google died, and what we have left is this trash heap.
I'm a B.Eng. + Masters and in 2020 I can't for the life of me figure out how to set ringing and notifications on my Android.<p>Sometimes it rings for email, sometimes not, when I go to the screen to turn on/off it's all greyed out.<p>I can have 'up to N' rings per day for certain things which simply doesn't make sense in most situations (missing sms?).<p>WTF is going on?<p>We are facing 'complexity disasters' all around us and Google is not the only culprit.<p>Hint: your product is completely useless unless you've made it clear and easy to use. We don't care 'what it does' until it is at least that.
One thing I have always thought is odd, is that a multinational company that has ~billions of users would have a single UI. At Google or Facebook scale, it would seems like having a more localized UI per region would make more sense. It isn't like they don't have the money to do this, and most of the service is behind an API/server-side, so having a different front-end better localized to, say, Arabic users, doesn't seem like it would place an undue burden on them.
I'd add that material UI is one of the <i>worst</i> things to come out of Google, and their implementation in GCP, Gmail etc. I absolutely hate it, and it looks cheap. Even Windows 10 interface looks better.<p>Even though Material UI is functional, there is something off about it. Something is weird about it, and I can't tell what. Maybe there's a word for it. It feels/looks cheap, like designed for the lowest common denominator device. Like... at least add a backdrop filter/blur to it, it gives a different feeling. The current flat design feels <i>dead</i> and soul less.<p>The <i>only</i> place where material UI is suitable is Google search. Not Gmail, not GCP and DEFINATELY NOT on stock android.
I think it seems more like Google doesn’t care about UX because they don’t prioritize/reward work on a product once it doesn’t grow in user numbers.<p>They do care in the early stages when there’s an opportunity for quick growth (and promotions for those involved)
Tbh, It might just be me, but I am starting to feel that the vanity of Material Design is also starting to fade away. People are moving towards other options. In fact, with so many people in the design space doing great work I think users are starting to realise that the initial craze around the precise/scientific design that Google claimed Material Design to be is not really it. Things can be better than material design, and we are seeing it.<p>Recently with blueprintjs, notion, fluent design, and whatnot things I think have started to change for better. And then there is always apple doing its thing.
YouTube is one of the biggest victims ever of UI/UX that has been crippled on purpose.<p>• Picture-on-Picture has been artificially blocked on iOS for years.<p>• Autoplay next video but no auto-repeat, what the fuck?<p>• Weirdass TikTok-wannabe format for short videos that you can't save in your playlists along with other limitations.<p>• Comments have been broken and unmoderated since forever.<p>• Hard to access all your playlists and edit them.<p>• Can't scroll through the comments while viewing the video on desktop, but you can on mobile.
The issue with user interfaces and web apps like Google's properties with billions of users is that you cannot change the user interface significantly, period. Doing so will alienate many hundreds of millions of users that rely on that user interface to get work done every day, and to suggest they do that is kind of naive to the bigger picture.<p>The apps mentioned in the article are business apps - if users really want to use Quip or Notion and their user interfaces instead of Google Apps - they can and sometimes do just use those instead.<p>What Google had done occasionally is introduce new apps with a different user interface over the same data, like it did with it's then new email software Inbox a while back, but you can't just dramatically change the user interface paradigms of an existing application because it's not hip anymore. Hundreds of millions of people would then have to re-learn how to do the same thing in the new interface, and billions of dollars of productivity would be lost in training, Q&A, and brand equity. An example of this is Microsoft transition to the ribbon interface for Office Apps, which was super painful for organizations.
> How can you run Gmail on an interface that’s tangibly worse than anything else out there?<p>Like what?<p>> How can you let Google Docs get completely obsoleted by startups?<p>What startups?<p>It's perfectly fine to critique Google UI/UX as "horrible", but if one going to do that, there needs to some examples of UI/UX which are excellent for those kinds of applications.<p>So, who does noteworthy UI/UX ?
Speaking of horrible UX, how do I close this annoying popup?<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/GaQDt82.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/GaQDt82.png</a>
The most fundamental problem at Google, of which bad UX/UI is one symptom, is that product management has no real power there. Engineering has all the power there, and basically does whatever it likes. It takes product management research as "input" for its decisions, but does not share power with product management.<p>Strong, competent product management balances user needs, marketplace conditions (competing and complementary products), and technological factors to create optimal products. What we see from the outside are products that are technologically strong, but suffer from lack of useful user perspective and market awareness.<p>Google will never create new (i.e. post search and AdWords) great products until it undergoes a complete cultural transformation toward a product management-focus.
The new version of Gmail is still horrible. Every day, I'll do things too fast, and it will pop alerts because some ajax request or promise hasn't resolved completely.<p>I expected that things would get better eventually, but that has not been the case.
As someone working for a corporation that's in a lot of ways similar to Google, I'm no longer surprised that a big and successful company that's supposed to be full of smart people can be so incompetent.
I feel like I'm living on crazy island but I personally have no problem with Google's UI. Not just because I haven't used better, but I've also used much, much worse. It's functional enough.
And the thing is, Google UI/UX is not all that awful in many ways. Compared to some other corporate websites it looks and functions pretty well. But it could be so much better and which we would expect for a company of Google's caliber.<p>Having no way to do self-reflection to treat this problem is a bad sign that people inside Google are perhaps getting out of touch with what is really going out there. Or that there is enough inertia to block good design changes to pass through. Whatever it is, I would hope they would start stepping out of their own bubbles to actually understand what type of interfaces people like to use. Visit the factories with the machine consoles where there is only simple buttons and easy-to-understand menus for everything. And then try to retrace their path to the current interfaces and think why they have to be like what they are right now.<p>It's like relationships, you probably get attracted at first by the appearance of things but it is when that wears off you get the sense of what the other person really is. With UIs, that novelty can wear off pretty quick if it feels like pulling out teeth to use it (Google Analytics is one horror show).
It's not just horrible UI/UX. Google atleast used to be known for their aggressive focus on engineering performance & latency.<p>Anyone remembers when Google bought the Chromium team, Chrome was first launched, and it was lauded as the fastest and lightest browser? Fast forward today, and Chrome is the epitome of sluggishness, a godzilla of a browser. Gmail? Same – horrible, bloated, slow. Google G-Suite? Same. Android? Symbol of inefficiency, barely usable after throwing tens of gigs of RAM, CPU and huge batteries. Google Cloud Console? Piles of steaming slow foam.<p>It's almost as if, show me a product that Google does that is fast today, other than the bare minimum Google home page search box.<p>On one hand, they're facing erosion of product management. On the other hand, it's no longer an Engineering-driven company in the sense their engineering is not able to drive atleast that UI/UX to work performant.
Google.com however still looks and works almost exactly as it did 20 years ago. I don't know of any other site that has done that. I must give them credit for keeping the flame of simplicity lit and not giving into churning ads on the world's #1 Alexa ranked site.
Google's new icons are literally camouflaged. They have simple shapes, but the color changes break the shapes into indiscriminate masses of stuff.<p>That's exactly what animals and the military do to disguise themselves: They break their own shape and outline so it can't be snap-recognized as being distinct from the environment.<p>Google's new icons do exactly that, except that app icons should be snap-recognizable. Now they're a herd of zebras where you can't tell where one begins and another ends.<p>Someone ran a colorblindness filter on them. Predictably, they looked better because turning everything non-blue into yellow made the shapes more coherent.
This is not a high quality article. It’s more fodder for people to share their views in the comments but the article itself is not really HN caliber. Mostly just saying things suck without much specifics.
pretty ridiculous short sighted article. "Materialize or whatever". C'mon. If you don't know anything about it shut up. Material did huge things for usability and uniformity across the google landscape.<p>Over on Analytics, you're not reading stuff and clicking upgrade/migrate whatever and then complaining. Lame man. Yeah, it's complicated, maybe too much for casual users like yourself but it's also complicated for power users who are doing all sorts of things at different levels with it.<p>And this idea that EOL-ing products that everyone on here complains about every single week is all based on magical speculation that it affects 'large swathes of people... perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions'. You're in a bubble man, not that many ppl were affected by Reader shutdown. Inbox. Etc. The Inbox features made their way into Gmail as the one Googler describes features evolve in smaller steps. And everyone moved on from Reader but RSS never died as a tech anyways so geezus, follow some twitter streams or sign up to some newsletters and get with it.
Just some anecdotal fun, but I was looking into gsuite to separate work on a side-project from my main line of work.<p>The side project wasn’t ramped up enough to really need gsuite but... still, it felt like trying to use a two decades old operating system. Everything is scattered around in these oddly named apps, most I’ve never heard of and they don’t explain themselves. It was awful, I gave up after a couple weeks.
If these products all needed to compete for users, maybe google would get left behind. But many of the bad examples mentioned are from Docs and Gmail and things with large networks effects and huge frictional costs for users wishing to switch services, not even mentioning the services that are near monopolies and for which users don’t have many alternatives to.
I think this sudden performance improvement of many services after the outage earlier today is indicative of how Google lost its way:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25416812</a><p>It's very hard for me to find a good explanation for why this isn't the normal performance.
The criticism of the Gmail desktop web interface seems insubstantial. There's a screenshot with some boxes drawn over it, but what's actually wrong with it?<p>Ask yourself also whether the desktop web interface of gmail is the most important one, or if its audience has been surpassed by that of the Android or iOS apps.
One thing from the article I really wish they fix, is adding labels!<p>I get confused so much nowadays with the icons, and many apps no longer even have an option to expand and show the labels. And all the labels are mono-color too, no more colorful icons that help make them distinguishable.
I'll be frank: Google's UX blows most other enterprise suites out of the water.<p>Maybe not as slick as other startsup/apps - but it aligns well with me.<p>The one major thing I'd suggest to Google is to have a better Drive search.
I can't think of a single Google product, aside Inbox and Google Sheets, where I use it because I <i>like</i> to use it (well, not Inbox anymore). Everything else is either incumbent, utility or free.
I'm frustrating every time when I open a Map from Google Search. It opens weirdly feature-reduced version map and there's no link to open full Google Maps.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but as an outsider, it's hard to judge exactly why Google (and other major offenders like Facebook and Apple) have lost the plot in recent years.<p>I suspect a big part of it is believing your own hype. You have a goose that has been laying golden eggs for more than a decade, as a result of which you have an army of staff paid astronomical salaries and effectively unlimited budgets to do anything else, as long as the goose is protected. This removes any need for efficiency, effective feedback loops or any kind of meaningful customer support or service standards.<p>And notice that the goose <i>is</i> always protected. Google's search UI is still very similar to the money printing machine that launched it all those years ago. Facebook's whole UI is still built around a news feed and the concept of keeping up with people you know. Apple still operates a mostly closed ecosystem with expensive but relatively good and prestigious devices and strong control over the software ecosystem that has grown around them. No-one is going to risk undermining the foundations any time soon. And the rest, frankly, doesn't matter.<p>This wouldn't be such a problem except that the immense financial power and network effects that these huge tech firms can bring to bear are enough to move national economies or to create or destroy whole industries, industries that might be supporting millions of users and providing livelihoods for millions of people (or, tomorrow, might not). While the success or failure of a new moonshot project might not be here or there to the senior executives preparing for their next quarterly call, it might accidentally crush a startup that much better people had spent many years working on and done a much better job but without the unlimited budget and free publicity. While shutting down the latest adventure into social networking might be a footnote on the annual report, it might inconvenience millions of people who had invested their time into getting set up on it. While breaking email as we have known it for decades in the name of fighting spam (badly, of course) might be a little "oops" for Google, it's screwing up communications between friends and between work colleagues and between businesses and their customers all over the world.<p>These tech giants are a plague on society, managing to limit or even reverse progress across the whole tech industry and undermining the efforts of millions of people to make the world a better place with all the amazing things we know how to do today. It really is long past time they were broken up, and all the other things they do forced to stand or fall on merit instead of leeching off the goose's golden eggs. The broken UIs are just one small symptom of a much more fundamental problem.
First time I had to use GSuite I was truly puzzled that this is an enterprise offering.<p>The UI is so unprofessional and confusing - really made me miss Microsoft (which is far away from being excellent).
Google, stop showing me those annoying privacy boxes each time I open search or youtube in private mode. And don't tell me, you did that because of regulations, because you can easily provide a plugin (or browser option) to disable them all.<p>On YouTube I have to close two dialogs, before I can start watching videos. Very annoying.