HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is Google failing at UI/UX/design simplicity in its products?

44 points by palashkulsh ↗ HN
The 2 google products which I have to frequently use are gmail.com and chat.google.com. Google chat has very bad user experience. And so is the new gmail update Which focusses so much on fluffy design that it diverges away from simple yet powerful gmail.tasks in gmail are unhandy now. your thoughts!!

52 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread
rayvy
waits 5 minutes for gmail to load

Yes

josteink
looks at a big screen filled exclusively with flat text and flat, non-descript icons on a big, flat white background

Yes.

beeskneecaps
But there’s a beautiful webgl envelope animation to watch now so it’s all good.
blcknight
Google is a steaming pile of dinosaur dung these days.
dang
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
blcknight
HN itself is unsubstantive.
dang
This the internet. It's hard to be anything other than shitty. It's all relative, and if you have an account here we need you not to make it worse.
teaneedz
when was google ever good at UX?
josteink
It may be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when every web-based product google made seemed like amazing, fluid pixie-dust magic compared to the competition.

Things I can remember being absolutely revolutionary when new:

- Gmail

- Google maps

- Google docs

At the time, this quality and sophistication of engineering was simply unheard of for web-based products.

Now they’re all slow, laggy, terrible resource hogs with ugly, non-intuitive UI on top. Worse in almost every way.

They’ve clearly lost their edge.

Reedx
I'd say they were originally with google.com. It had much better UX than other search engines at the time. Which were typically cluttered with news, weather, horoscopes and lots of other non-search related stuff. Google's version being focused purely on search was very refreshing and a lot nicer to use.

Would also echo the other replies re: gmail.

ASalazarMX
Without googling, do you know where you organize your contacts in the new gmail update? It wasn't intuitive before, but I think it's even less now.
chrisper
The design I hate most about google is the delayed moving UI. Like I am about to tap something and something pops up and I tap on something else. So frustrating.
anonuser123456
This 100 times.
sonnyblarney
I have unknowingly archived about a dozen mails by clicking them in my inbox, and unwittingly pressing an archive button that 'just appeared' beneath my cursor.

The odd thing is - these are well known anti-patterns in design!

kevingadd
The worst part is it's not a one-off issue, it's embedded all over in Android. Even the keyboard does it - when you tap a textarea typically there's a brief pause before the keyboard appears and shuffles everything around, so if you were trying to tap a suggestions list you're in for an unpleasant surprise because the keyboard pushed a button up under your finger.

Google Maps is probably the worst offender here because the Android app randomly adjusts its layout based on info it pulls over the network at startup, so over the course of 2-10 seconds buttons and menu items and the map itself will all shift around, making it a complete mystery what tapping the screen will actually do.

yroc92
Try using spotlight search on iOS. Every single time I search for an app, without fail, I click on a web link that suddenly appeared in place.
anuraj17
Even look at Google Drive. The UI is terrible and slow
volandovengo
Overall, Google at the very least has published their Material Design guidelines that are very good.

https://material.io/design/

That said, I'm annoyed that they are shutting down inbox. The UX of it was amazing.

rchaud
Google's own websites use Material design guidelines extremely sparingly if at all. Material Design is most commonly seen on Android apps, and that's usually because app developers aren't interested in customizing the look and feel beyond the bare minimum.
superasn
Google's updates are hit and miss. Yes gmail is slow and bloated but I've just noticed an incredibly update that lets me write my email by just typing a few words (its ai autocompletes the rest for me.. how incredible is that?)
watwut
Google was always bad at UX and they are somehow getting worst.
zzzcpan
Being bad at something and swimming in cash only provides more opportunity to do bad. Without competition nothing good is ever rewarded.
edanm
Thinking about it as "Google failing", as if Google is in practice a single entity that can be failing or not at its UI/UX, is probably the wrong way to think about it. Google is built up of many, many teams - some of them will prioritize UI/UX, some won't, some will be good at it, some won't, etc.

Of course there is some amount of influence that the culture and internal processes of Google exert on its product teams, and I'd argue that it was never really that good at UI to begin with. But I still think it's usually a bad idea to think of a company as a whole, because people will start playing the "but look at this product's UI" game, which isn't very productive.

palashkulsh
agreed, that its not a single entity. UX is far more important to users than UI in my opinion. Google's UX used to be good but now I've experienced its shortcomings in many of its updated products.
roberttod
Tried to get my Google home setup to call people. It takes 3 different apps on my iPhone to configure it, Google Home, Google Assistant and Google Voice. In the end I couldn't get my contacts to sync so gave up. One should not need a tutorial to do this sort of thing.
lowlevel
I find all google products difficult to use or figure out what the are doing. Many things are non-obvious and not easily discoverable. Not Snapchat bad, but pretty bad.
sonnyblarney
Google is an Eng. driven company that excels at UI when it can be resolved to 'speed' and 'minimalism'. Speed is an easy thing for Eng. to understand you don't even need to tell them to do it, they will start to optimize wether you want it or not, like dogs to the bone. To this day 'delivered in 0.6 seconds' appears in Search.

Minimalism is the poor man's design choice - which is good - it forces UI to focus on the essential. This is why early Google interfaces were kind of ugly, but so hyper utilitarian we did not care. But minimalism does not help if you're facing an existentially tricky interface with a high degree of irreducible complexity - i.e. there is simply too much information.

At this point you need good UI design which is founded upon a culture of UI design and has to be supported right from the top.

Nobody with hard power at Google seems to speak this language so is there hope?

Design is also often a matter of opinion - and making some tough choices on behalf of your users which can be hard. Apple does this in order to get rid of a lot of clutter, you just don't see stuff that might be useful.

And there are some choice disasters ... if you're using Chrome and logged in, and using YouTube - you might notice you are using '3 accounts' at the same time - the top right corner will have your 'Chrome' id, and YouTube has multiple Id's within an account, I've been using YT for years and have no idea what that is.

... and in the new Gmail I've accidentally archived a load of emails because of the 'magic buttons' that appear here and there floating over your inbox.

The list goes on of course.

satyenr
Look no further than stock Android! I know a lot of people like stock Android for whatever reason, but I have always hated it. To me, it feels immature and cartoonish. And let’s not even talk about all that wasted white space! I am forever hoping Google will take some aesthetic cues from the like of MIUI.

I know it is depends on personal taste, but I absolutely cannot stand the stock Android UI. Unfortunately, there are no other options if you care about security, quick updates and devices supported for long. Also, since other UIs (MIUI, EMUI etc) are not supported by Google, the apps seem very different from the OS — i.e. there is no continuity.

jjpe
They're failing, and hilariously so. The Gmail GUI is awful, it's slow (especially on non-chrome browsers), you're still being tracked (nothing new but still worth mentioning) and manipulated. And worse, the slowness thing was done for (allegedly) anti-competitive reasons.

Then there's android and chrome: the new material design style is something you need to be a little brainwashed to really like, as a lot of space is simply wasted on eye-searing white backgrounds.

And finally, let's talk about search, Google’s raison d'etre. It's consistently dropped in quality. For example, a number of years ago I'd never even think about going to page 2 or even 3, or even going to another search engine. But now it's par for the course, since page 1 is just chock full of garbage e.g. advertisements (nothing new, but still) and links that don't even come close to providing the answer to my question.

Quite frankly, properly justifying staying with Google is starting to get seriously difficult.

johnjohnsmith
"The usability of an OS is inversely proportional to the size of its control panel." --A college friend, circa 2000

Let's pick a particular UI/UX combo, the GUI: how have GUIs evolved over 3 decades, what has their complexity curve been like?

Microsoft:

MSDOS->WIN3->WIN3.1->WFW311->WinNT->Win95->Win2000->WinXP->Win7->Win8->Win10

Having used all of them, I'd say there was a huge drop in UI/UX from MSDOS to Win3, but then steady improvement which peaked around Win2000, cratered, and is crawling back.

The complexity ramped significantly: MSDOS6.22 was simple, solid (yes) and predictable, and Win3 destroyed that for a loooong time. WinNT was a solid rebuild, and merging it with Win3x led to Win2000, IMHO the peak. Now Win10 can't decide if it is a mobile OS or desktop OS, or an advertising platform, and it feels that way when I try to use it. Tiles and old-time Dialogs are in constant contention, the look in feel is at war with itself. I don't even know how to help people with problems anymore because I've lost track of the Win10 control panel after WinXP when I stopped developing.

Microsoft has seen what Google is experiencing, but I do not think MS is out of the woods yet. They appear to be trying to make it simpler...

Apple Mac

Classic MacOS up to v9 -> MacOSX -> all the mountains

I did zero Mac development until OSX, but I spent a lot of time using Adobe products and eVision/Max audio tools. The controls remained largely consistent: from one OS to the next for over 15 years the paradigms were the same. That's the longest stretch of stability. OSX has been exploding with features, specifically cloud based things that I don't want.

I think Apple is on the "oh shit this is a mess" peak. They too are trying to figure out the macos+iOS strategy and it smells like convergence, but I bet they have 5-10 more years in this feature-rich mess.

iOS

Do we all yearn for the simpler days of iOS when the control panel was more compact and there were fewer confusing gestures? Yes. iOS is exploding in complexity.

Android - I don't use it. /shrug/

Linux Desktops - I've been using MWM since 1992. The entire KDE / Gnome debate was a giant clusterfuck IMHO. I've tried using fancy Linux desktops that were supposed to be Windows-killers and its like wearing your shoes on the opposite feet. I can't say this has hit peak complexity because it hasn't really gotten attention from serious UI/UX talent.

Amiga, OS/2, NeXT ... I don't know enough about these, or they didn't last long enough to experience the complexity curve.

TL;DR

I think it is safe to say that Microsoft has the most experience trying to wrangle failed UI/UX experiments at scale. Mac & Google are just learning this. I think it will be at least a decade before the latter two are able to conceptually shrink the UX footprint of the O/S. My guess: everything converges to tile-based mobile-like UIs on desktop, laptop and mobile. Mobile OSes are just fine for desktops. IMO.

blattimwind
> Tiles and old-time Dialogs are in constant contention, the look in feel is at war with itself.

Many years ago MS made a book which pretty much said "Official UX guidelines" on the cover; later this was available in MSDN. It was actually quite good, though of course the OS never managed to adhere consistently. Useful advice for developers. Now there is only a short guideline with a mixture of different technologies and mostly focusing on tiny details, no big picture at all.

The change in these guidelines is reminiscent of the change experienced in the accompanying Windows releases.

(That being said, I'm baffled just how bad the default styling of Windows 10 looks. It reminds me of the flat styling available in 2000/XP [I don't mean the standard 3D 95 look]. And I was taken aback that someone somehow somewhere managed to actually make the Windows 10 start menu worse than the Windows 7 start menu, which was already laughably bad.)

bsvalley
I believe Google is relying way too much on data rather than using basic and common sense. It’s been like this for years. They don’t apply proper UX rules per se, hiding crucial features (by literally making them almost impossible to find) is probably their main weakness. Youtube, obviously gmail, now even google search is hard to use. Data is great but don’t rely 100% on it! Use human brains...
chewz
On Android you have Google Home App which lets you manage your Google Home and other Cast devices but to set some options you need Google App. Just an example.

It is either deliberate dark pattern or just pure idiocy. In my opinion it is the second. Google is just a rudderless ship on so many levels that I feel sorry for them. And this accumulating randomness is hurting their business and their future prospects.

Google is in dire need of real managers and leaders not just some clever guys who got their jobs by solving riddles.

bsvalley
And when you need to use multiple google accounts it shows all the weaknesses in their products. Singing out from an account and signing in to another account on the same machine generates a security email all the time. If you have 3-4 different accounts for instance that’s a lot of security emails in your inbox every day.. I’m sure there’s a way to deactivate this thing but it would take me about an hour to figure it out.
sonnyblarney
This is a fiefdom issue I think - there doesn't seem to be an overall product strategy at G that creates a kind of coherence, it's loose, at best. It's a hard thing to do, but if either of the founders or Sundar made it a priority, it would happen. Few companies are good at this, even Apple seems odd, I get confused sometimes between iTunes, AppStore, iCloud yada yada.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
iamjk
Bring back inbox!
buboard
adsense is far worse. in fact everything revamped to cards interface is insufferably slow and superfluous.
catacombs
Yes, just look at Gmail. Not sure the same can be said about Google Docs/Sheets. Those programs, within the last few months or so, have become hilarious sluggish and, sometimes, barely usable.
CM30
Yeah, and not just in the more visual elements either. Gmail is a perfect example of them ignoring 'if it's not broke, don't fix it', but I think the main problem is how they're so obsessed with trying to 'guess' what you want rather than let you decide yourself.

This is especially notable in Google Search, where the results will often be outright irrelevant to your query, remove terms they assume aren't necessary and do absolutely everything on the assumption that a wrong result is better than no result.

So many of Google's UI/UX/design issues would be fixed if they just got out of the user's way and let them do what they intended rather than trying to guess in advance.

kmarc
Cluttered, inconsistent, and very sloooooooo...

So this week I visited Google Cloud Summit where a googler overheard that I just migrated away from gmail web UI for it's slowness. He walked up to me, corrected me, told me my laptop is slow, and GMail is fast. I showed him http://bit.ly/gmail-slow but he insisted it's fast and sleek and perfect. Then I was asked to show him on my own laptop right there, it took a good 15-20 seconds again to load and be able to start writing an email. ¯\_(シ)_/¯

...oooooooow

[dead] countryqt30
Since this update, GMAIL basically became unusable. They forgot that PEOPLE use the product. Time is getting ripe for Google being disrupted, because their products are just so poor and they don't care about users anymore.
askthrowaway
Let's add Google Play Console to the list, I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to publish a beta version.