This is assuming malice when you could assume incompetence (to whatever slight degree this stuff is).
Probably these things got put in a future release, or are in the backlog still. Well meaning product designers wanted them and can't have them or some other typical big-co reason a product gets little iteration.
Have you seen Google's latest icons? They aren't exactly known for doing what is competent, sane, or useful.
It took them years and years to finally make the "Ignore Toll Roads" on Google maps not reset after you close the app, even after tons of bug reports with hundreds of responses.
Sheets has gone through massive improvements in features.
It's no Excel, especially for bigger sheets or complex functions, but it's been a good way to provide my website users with a web spreadsheet. I'm reminded this every 4 years when I need to install Excel.
Smart Canvas are an amazing update coming later this year. Took years in the making, but well-worth it.
Working with dozens of people through Docs and Sheets, I love their evergreen-ness. Sure, I wish there were more features but it's amazing to keep software simple, especially when it is used so widely.
I think you have that backwards. It takes a strong stomach to claim Google isn't facing competition on Google Sheets and threatening their market share would cause them to start caring. The more likely scenario is they have given up on winning any market share as serious users refuse to switch from Excel and non serious users have pads of paper and pencil, leaving Google just a tiny slice of the pie between those two groups to even fight for.
I would guess it has to do with what I have heard is the promotion path at Google. It seems you need to ship, and ship new things, if you want to be a serious contender. That leaves few engineers willing to take a look at Google Sheets issues and put together a PR to fix these things.
I don’t think competition in UX exists generally. Just look at all the products in any space out there (for example, Dell, Logitech, etc.) and how many of them would you say has a good consistent product design team?
Honestly from my experience, people just don’t care. Devs will just say it’s by design and it’s the users’ fault, product owners don’t use the product so much as develop it, and everyone else is just detached from what they’re making. In the end, no one really owns the product.
This is why I use a self-hosted bookmark manager like Shiori, although I concede that I haven't found an ideal bookmark manager yet. I wish Chrome would have never built both its own bookmark manager and password manager, as well as Firefox. I believe those types of tasks are best left up to the community, and that for the most part web browsers should not be trying to re-invent what is already there.
Essentially all the folders and organization for Google Docs happens through Google Drive. So you have to keep switching between the two. Why is the Google Drive interface not embedded in Google Docs instead of that dumb list of documents?
I know right?! I've been ranting about this for the past year, having to use docs for a small organization. All I want is Google drive but when you click on a text file it takes you into the docs editor.
I can't speak to Chrome's handling of bookmarks one way or the other, but the author fundamentally misunderstands both the history of Drive and its current application.
Regarding history: Drive had tags early on and a lack of hierarchical folder categorization (think of "files sorted like email messages" instead of "files sorted in a hierarchy"). Users pushed back with a very clear demand for folders, so Google implemented them (at which point, tags are redundant). 100% of the functionality of tags exists via folders and the ability to use Shortcuts (select a doc in Drive and shift-Z) to assign a file to multiple folders.
Regarding current application: Drive syncs to filesystems of major OSes and is therefore constrained somewhat in supporting features that are maintainable across multiple OS filesystem abstractions. I don't doubt Google could find a way to implement the wishlist the author describes, but the value / cost ratio is questionable.
Author's claim of lack of support for folder colors is also just false. I agree that his full laundry-list isn't present, but folder colors are accessible by right-clicking on a folder in the Drive UI and selecting "Change color".
All of that having been said, the author's own app seems to be well-positioned to address those wants so I'm not sure why they are making wild guesses at Google's intentions instead of just taking advantage of the big, lumbering megacorp being big and lumbering and back-filling those features for users.
Or, you know, they happen to have a pretty good search solution and don't want to spend time and risk building something else. Large organizations nearly cannot change course, that's why the blowups are so spectacular and seem so dumb (ex: Kodak).
Or, you know, they happen to have a pretty good
search solution and don't want to spend time
and risk building something else
You wrote "or" as if this was an alternative conclusion. However, this is essentially identical to the thesis of the linked article:
Google’s core business is still search. By
neglecting UI and design for these products,
Google corals user behavior into a “search-first”
mentality. The more disorganized you become, the
more reliant you become on search, and Google
benefits.
macOS takes the same approach with Finder however. Managing files in macOS is a huge pain if you want to keep it in some nicely organized tree. Its optimized for just searching to find what you're looking for. It presents all files in a flat list by default.
Apple's primary business model is not search, so there could be some evidence that more people just prefer search over tags/folders/icons etc.
There is tons if options to find files on macOS: the find command, spotlight, search in the finder, hierarchical view in the finder. Which popular OS has a better system than that?
This exactly. Yesterday I needed to change my Touch ID settings and typed "Touch ID" into Spotlight search. First result: the dictionary definition of "Touch ID". Nowhere in the list: The System Preferences applet called exactly "Touch ID". Seriously?
I have to agree with this. The search in macos is really broken. There are so many problems with it.
It could be so much better but they havent improved it in years.
Even using Alfred i dont get what i want sometimes. Maybe its because alfred is using spotlight indexes? I’d have to look it up.
Yep, Spotlight is my go-to to launch apps but for files, it's either extremely slow, or extremely inaccurate, or simply doesn't show anything but web results. Frustrating...
Same for Finder's search, defaults to searching weird folders and bad at reducing the noise.
Maybe it's just because I've been using OSX since 10.2 but I've never had any problems keeping files in trees, I have a very nicely pruned set of nested folders that I keep all my work in. If you wanna dump all your shit in ~/Documents then sure you can do it, but it's also super easy to stick folders in the Finder sidebar or the Dock for easy access to your big multifile projects.
To search for a note you have to press the search box twice. First time you just get types of things - if you want to search free text you have to press again.
I'd argue that UI encourages using tags over search.
It's honestly my only major annoyance about Google Keep.
Sorry, I thought you meant reordering as in manual ordering. No, as far as I can tell, there is no way to sort or automatically reorder notes or lists by anything.
Guess I'm happy with the minimal features :-) basic notes, syncs across devices, I use a Google account anyway and my notes appear in Google takeout for backup/export purposes.
I have a number of nits with this post (e.g. OP is confusing Docs and Drive), but more generally I don't get OP's point.
Drive search, bookmark search, and Web search are totally different features in totally different products. Notably, the first two have no ads, so driving you to search in this case has no clear positive effect for Google.
Google also debuted a new Driving Mode on Google Maps that... entirely changes the UI of of the app and several parts of the phone interface itself. I have never had to look at my phone while driving more in my entire life. It's my fault for using the phone, but it very nearly caused 2 accidents for me this weekend as I tried to get google maps to update or display a particular UI. I truly wonder what is going on over there -- I try not to assume bad intent but a lot of this stuff feels almost violently anti-user.
Man, I thought I was going nuts. For a pretty long time now I've just been dumbfounded when no or seemingly arbitrary street names are rendered (usually when I zoom in; when it counts). This happens for all sorts of streets, regardless of their significance. It's slightly insane this still occurs.
That still occurs, and shows no signs of changing. It seems to be a purposeful decision.
And this very aspect is what makes Google Maps not a proper map. It's optimized for point-to-point navigation, where you know the place you want to get to.
And they don't give you the street name until your 3 miles or less. Its the dumbest thing ever. The numbers are so small on the actual exits and if your in HOV lane it doesn't say exit for exit # 118. It says exit for sunset blvd.
My favorite is during navigation when my current location is placed 3/4 of the way across the screen, that is 3/4 of the screen is used to display the route I've already driven.
> it very nearly caused 2 accidents for me this weekend
This wouldn't have been accidental, it would have been fully your own fault for negligence.
I'll fully admit this is a pedantic tangent but it's been long acknowledged that "accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash (for instance, using an app to navigate instead of being better acquainted with your route ahead of time):
This comment is not the way to win that culture war.
Agree that using phones while driving is generally bad, but implying that it is irresponsible to use turn-by-turn (and suggesting the alternative of just knowing where you are) is just more likely to make people ignore the problem all together.
> but implying that it is irresponsible to use turn-by-turn
It isn't irresponsible to use turn-by-turn navigation (and I don't think GP is implying that). It's irresponsible to fiddle with the phone you are using for that purpose while driving.
I've seen this "accident" redefinition around before, it looks to me like some silly armchair pedantry, combining the sports of redefining words and judging others. We have courts that can judge culpability / responsibility and decide if a collision was a no fault accident or something negligent, deliberate, whatever. But we also have these neo-political thugs that want to try and use language to manipulate and define what we are allowed to do, so you get these childish redefinitions.
I'm driving somewhere 6 hours away that I've never been with a dog in the car. Normally it's quite safe for me to do things like manage turn by turn navigation, and pick up a hands free call, or pause an audiobook, or ask the phone to reroute me to food, gas, or a rest stop.
If you are able to drive solo 6 hours to a new place in total silence without stopping for food, rest, or gas, or touching the turn by turn navigations to make an update, I'll fly you out to me and pay you $1000 a day to teach me how.
You're still avoiding taking all the blame by making excuses and being super defensive. You know damn well sitting in total silence was not my suggestion.
I am also able to manage those things without taking my eyes off the road for more than I would looking at my speedometer. If there's a new UI that's new and different, you should have pulled over to figure it out instead of almost crashing not once, but twice.
For whatever reason you really have an axe to grind here. I understand you can get pedantic about my phrasing and language but when I tell you I was 100% at fault, what do you gain by picking apart my language to try to prove to me I don't feel that way? I do feel that way, thanks!
> I am also able to manage those things without taking my eyes off the road for more than I would looking at my speedometer.
Yea so that would be normal operating procedure for me as well! Definitely I should have pulled over when the severity of the UI change became clear to me, but it was already too late and I was slamming the brakes. I was in the far left lane in bumper to bumper traffic and it wasn't quite as simple as you think it must have been. Can you understand my frustration at needing to do that? I made the wrong choice and I didn't do that. Can you still understand my frustration with the situation?
>You're still avoiding taking all the blame by making excuses and being super defensive
Since you are so concerned about automobile safety, do you have any suggestion on how to get a taxi/Uber/Lyft/etc driver who keeps at least one hand firmly grasping the steering wheel at all times the car is in motion?
> it's been long acknowledged that "accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash
I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days.
Certainly the way laws are written, there is quite a high bar before an "accident" brings the kinds of criminal charges that any other reason for a similar action would trigger. For example, if you kill someone through inattention, that is often charged as involuntary manslaughter, unless you did it with a car and were following traffic laws, in which case it is rarely charged.
As a society we have traditionally come to accept that driving kills lots of people, often but not always at random, and we don't want to be handing out random prison sentences for those with merely bad luck. (Or, at least, without provable blame.)
I suspect there will be backlash, your post is one example.
> I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days.
The link I shared previously (Fonseca, 2020) mentions this:
---
Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident.
You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions.
In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars.
So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation.
In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken."
Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today.
The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.
Not sure why this was downvoted. It is my responsibility as a driver to not be distracted. If I am, I just stop at the next possibility - what's stopping me (pun intended)?
I'd rather not be responsible for any accident related to google maps, because ultimately, it'd be my fault, and I'd not feel relieved just because google changed its layout.
This is not about excusing the bad pattern of modernizing UI just for the sake of it, just about not relieving myself out of responsibility.
Driving off the road ain't a collision if you don't collide with anything, but it's still an accident.
I agree with you, but that ain't a great word either.
I'd like to have a word that also includes did-not-cause-accident-by-luck failures, such as running a red light or failing to notice a bicyclist who slammed brakes to avoid you sideswiping them.
I was gonna put this comment deep down the chain but Ill just leave it top level for everyone who is worked up about me using the normal phrase "car accident" to describe an incident where I would have been 100% at fault for using my phone.
I agree that I as the driver would have been at fault in an accident. Car accident is a really common thing to call it even when the person naming the incident is 100% at fault and knows it. I would have been 100% at fault and I know that.
Still, it's hard not to get frustrated when previously safe activities become unsafe because of a UI update that was ostensibly made to increase safety.
Apple Maps with the upcoming iOS 15 will also be changing their GUI a bit. I don't think apps should be frozen in time, but at the same time, I'm not sure how it can be updated safely given how human psychology works (people will fiddle with their phones while driving).
I find myself getting more and more disgruntled by what feels like actively hostile UX/UI in so many things. I wonder if anyone at some companies are even reviewing unpackaging their products, using them outside a lab, or ever watching someone use their thing.
I get emails from ServiceNow with zero details about the original ticket, I get shell packaging that makes me want to use power tools to open it, I get user interfaces so overran with calls to action that you can't find what you are looking for, no way to use your voice to correct a text while driving, i cant mute audio while the car is in reverse, and the price scanners at my local safe way are so finicky and track that everything is sitting on a scale and any mess up at all and now you need manual intervention as opposed to the self checkout at Walmart where you can just kinda wave your product near the scanner and it finds it and it doesn't yell at you when you put bags in your cart to make room for other purchases, and the list goes on.
You can't use Google Maps on a iPhone held in a bike handlebar mount, because every time you go over a bump, it shakes the phone, and that pops up the damn "Report a data problem" window.
Where's the fucking "Report a user interface problem" window???
Apple watch fixed this for me entirely. I just have to glance down at my wrist that's already on my steering wheel, and read a simple one-line instruction that takes milliseconds for my brain to parse "in 500 feet turn right on [Street]." It's also great for walking around sketchy neighborhoods, so I dont need to have my phone out.
Came here to say the same thing. I thought it was a well-known "meme" that Google Docs/Drive search was trash which is hilarious (or would be if I didn't have to use it for important stuff) coming from a search company.
This has always been a head scratcher to me. Google knows the frequency of doc access, it knows roughly who is on what team in my org, and which docs get spread widely. They should be able to knock this out of the park...
This is just the MVP culture we now have where only the very basics are implemented and nothing more. Whereas a computer used to be a power tool to maximise human capability, modern devices are now designed to subvert the user’s desires for the benefit of mega-corp by making users helpless.
I use Google maps for navigation between locations and it works great, not sure what your problem with it is, but if you want an alternate Waze works better imo.
My biggest complaint about Google Maps is the UI. Street names are difficult to read, the scale of how-far-away an upcoming turn is always off. Contrast could use improvements too.
There is also a lot of clutter.
These are traits that have all gotten worse over the years. I'd prefer the UI of the first-gen Google Maps then what we have today.
I have no complaints about the actual navigation, there has been quirks over the years but nothing that stands out in my mind.
Today I found about Organic Maps[0], and it seems like a viable alternative to Google Maps, albeit with some annoying quirks.
It is offline - meaning you download the areas you are interested in first, after which all the data is available fully offline (including stuff like directions, metro maps etc). The interface takes a bit to get used to, but the biggest let down is the fact that you can't edit a route in the route planner - you need to start all over again (selecting start/destination, no way to modify either).
One thing to note is that the bookmark manager the article describes is Chrome's bookmark manager rather than Google Bookmarks, which, remarkably, is still around given Google's penchant for killing products that don't work out. It looks almost the same as when it launched in 2005. The "Gooooogle" links at the bottom, for example, still use the old serif logo.
The person writing this is confusing their personal opinion for objective UX fact. It is commonly accepted that only highly organized users use features like tags. The vast majority of people simply don't. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that this is hostile it's possible Chrome and Docs just have a wider user-base than this particular author.
People will very much use organizing features if you provide them. Whether it's groups for icons, folders for files, labels for e-mails, tags and colors for documents, or drawers for socks - most people seem to recognize that being organized is a virtue, and will attempt it to the extent it is possible and convenient.
Not giving features for self-organization is a choice.
Do you have some basis for these assertions? Personally I agree with the GP but it's personal anecdata only. I would never consider using tags (or a sock drawer) and in my experience working with others with collaboration tools that use tags, there might be one person who is keen in them but they are never widely used. I think this backs up the GPs point that yes, some may find it useful, but it's not necessarily a "must have" that the majority are looking for, or even would use if it was splashed in their faces.
Bookmarks are shit for a variety of reasons. Far better to archive pages with images or PDFs. Link rot is so pervasive that just maintaining bookmarks is a waste of time. Tagging, sorting, and annotating files on storage you control is far more reliable.
Google is just trying to help users realize that the web is a bad source for organized information. Google sells expensive clicks to personal injury lawyers off of titanic spam plantations of SEO content —- their mission is orthogonal to the organization of information.
Except Bookmarks and Docs have folders already so the question isn't "no organization" vs "organization" but "tags" vs "folders." This book for example cites data that the majority of users prefer hierarchical organization: https://books.google.com/books?id=EO91DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=...
Adding tags has a chance of causing user confusion, UI congestion and impact on existing tools (in the case of Google Drive) so it's not a free thing to do.
For example one of the thing the book says is users of earlier Windows versions used hierarchical structures.
To which I point out: the only alternative wasn't tags but a flat non-hierarchical lack of structure.
Another thing: The Gmail team got it kind of right, they introduced hierarchical tags.
Sometimes one solution is obviously better and you just need to get the knowlegde out.
Other times there are good reasons to keep both: I personally very much want to have both folders and tags.
At no point should one however take the modern ux trick: hide the power tool, use the fact that no one use it anymore as proof that no one wants it and then remove it.
I don't even think it's about organization, more aesthetic sensibilities. Why would anyone want to have special folder icons? "Because it looks nice" is the only possibility that occurs to me.
I probably have over 1000 bookmarks myself, but I can't think of why I would want to "tag" a bookmark. Tags can be useful for finding new content, but if I bookmark a sit I probably know enough about it that I wouldn;t benefit from a tag.
The benefit of tags is that a single item can have multiple tags, so you're no longer constrained by having to decide on a specific folder hierarchy to organize them in. You can replace "folders" with tags entirely and still use tags as folders if you want, with the option of storing an item "in multiple folders" (give it multiple tags). Gmail has worked like this for a while: the inbox is just a filter which displays emails tagged with "inbox", which makes it even more confusing and inconsistent that Google's bookmarks and documents don't support this.
I suspect it's exactly because GMail supports it. Their data indicates that it's not a user friendly feature for the majority of users (ie: why labels can be nested since 2011) but it's grandfathered into GMail. GMail as I see it began with pure tags, spent a lot of effort trying to get people to use them and then ended up with quasi-folders.
It obviously is not user-friendly when you deprecate folders in favor of tags. That’s the thing which only a software developers mind could dream into reality. When they invent nested labels, it should scream “man that’s folder, folder, damned folder”. But it doesn’t.
Everything is a tag, why not right? They already have: everything is a list, everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a process. How much “everything is a” failures they need before realizing that these ideas were… obsessions I guess?
Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?
I accomplish this by butting the same bookmark in multiple folders. In my file structure I do this with symlinks, but a bookmark is pretty much just a link anyway.A tag is pretty much the same as just a parallel folder, right?
The whole point of being able to tag items in a hierarchical folder structure is to not have to manually find and update every duplicate copy of your bookmark when you want to change or delete it.
> if I bookmark a site I probably know enough about it that I wouldn't benefit from a tag.
The gulf between this and my own use of bookmarks is so, so vast.
I bookmark because I want to have something as a reference, or come back to it later (especially "bookmark all tabs").
I often think "Maybe I bookmarked this thing that I remember a few details of... hope those details are in the title, or that I happen to recognize the title!"
I often find that I've bookmarked the same site or page multiple times, because when I ran across it, I couldn't easily notice that I already had it saved.
The belief in the 2010s was that UX design was these pastel-coloured care bears that care deeply about the emotional well-being of people clicking things. And the golden rule was to reduce complexity, while weirdly also hobbling control over what the business logic slurped up.
It’s absurd to think that any and all suggestions mentioned here won’t be continually coming up in feedback or testing sessions. Is it more likely that Google have negligent designers, or they design for business goals?
I wish Youtube (and Youtube Music) had tags. Or at least a way to manage albums. It'd be nice to track "#ListenFromPitchfork" and "#ListenFromTheWire" to albums so I could manage sources.
Googles products are very confusing, not just the bookmarks but Google docs as well, or the workspace tools. I agree their UX leaves much to be desired, and if I had to bet 10 to 1 an aesthetic skin would be on the horizon quicker than any functional improvement
That majority user might never visit the bookmarks again once bookmarked and would likely use Google to search for the website again. So Google has incentive to not improve bookmarking, Though I'm not claiming that's the case.
I do agree with the other comments that if there are some features which solves some real problems[1] even the majority users would use it.
Bookmarks can help solve some new age problems too, I recently found phished website of our Income Tax site as a top result in Google[2] and those using bookmark to visit such sites which we use once a year could have prevented from getting phished.
I’ve noticed the inverse: when I replaced the Chrome new tab page with a custom .html file, I suddenly found myself using Google Search much less, using Google URL suggestions much less, and syncing less data to Google servers. The difference between a useless new tab page and a decent one had a real impact on my habits.
Similarly, when I switched from Google Maps to Apple Maps, the favorites UI was enough better that I started using it more and relying on search less.
There’s definitely a pattern of Google underperforming in ways that make you fall back on Google Search, sending Google data, and viewing Google ads.
I wrote my own local .html file, in a local unpackaged extension for Chrome to accept it. It was just four columns of links with favicons and multiple headings per column, and inline inputs to quickly search different sites, and modifier-less keyboard shortcuts like “h” so that you could hit Ctrl-T H to go to HN. The trick, if you can call it that, was that the layout was clear enough that you could pick between 30-50 options in a second or two once you’re used to it.
I considered polishing it for publication, but I think that what made it so good for me is I made it specific to my needs. Besides, I’m off Chrome now, and they fixed the bug I was using to steal focus from the URL bar to make shortcuts work.
I always wondered why could you not add a note to someone else’s email in gmail to make it searchable. Would allow you to make gmail UI even simpler and in vein with article's claims too.
You can. If you open the email, there is a "note" icon in the right sidebar. If you create a new note it tags the email to the note. But this may not be exactly what you want.
An idea I've had for a while is to store each bookmark's text content for text search, and automatically update the text once a week, and then make a p2p network for searching.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadProbably these things got put in a future release, or are in the backlog still. Well meaning product designers wanted them and can't have them or some other typical big-co reason a product gets little iteration.
It took them years and years to finally make the "Ignore Toll Roads" on Google maps not reset after you close the app, even after tons of bug reports with hundreds of responses.
It's no Excel, especially for bigger sheets or complex functions, but it's been a good way to provide my website users with a web spreadsheet. I'm reminded this every 4 years when I need to install Excel.
Working with dozens of people through Docs and Sheets, I love their evergreen-ness. Sure, I wish there were more features but it's amazing to keep software simple, especially when it is used so widely.
That they DGAF if they're not facing competition.
IE6 was the same.
Threaten them with loss of market share and they'll fix these things.
I would guess it has to do with what I have heard is the promotion path at Google. It seems you need to ship, and ship new things, if you want to be a serious contender. That leaves few engineers willing to take a look at Google Sheets issues and put together a PR to fix these things.
I wouldnt put google sheets in the same category. I think it has been improved over the years (perhaps not as much as it should have).
Honestly from my experience, people just don’t care. Devs will just say it’s by design and it’s the users’ fault, product owners don’t use the product so much as develop it, and everyone else is just detached from what they’re making. In the end, no one really owns the product.
Regarding history: Drive had tags early on and a lack of hierarchical folder categorization (think of "files sorted like email messages" instead of "files sorted in a hierarchy"). Users pushed back with a very clear demand for folders, so Google implemented them (at which point, tags are redundant). 100% of the functionality of tags exists via folders and the ability to use Shortcuts (select a doc in Drive and shift-Z) to assign a file to multiple folders.
Regarding current application: Drive syncs to filesystems of major OSes and is therefore constrained somewhat in supporting features that are maintainable across multiple OS filesystem abstractions. I don't doubt Google could find a way to implement the wishlist the author describes, but the value / cost ratio is questionable.
Author's claim of lack of support for folder colors is also just false. I agree that his full laundry-list isn't present, but folder colors are accessible by right-clicking on a folder in the Drive UI and selecting "Change color".
All of that having been said, the author's own app seems to be well-positioned to address those wants so I'm not sure why they are making wild guesses at Google's intentions instead of just taking advantage of the big, lumbering megacorp being big and lumbering and back-filling those features for users.
Apple's primary business model is not search, so there could be some evidence that more people just prefer search over tags/folders/icons etc.
Same for Finder's search, defaults to searching weird folders and bad at reducing the noise.
To search for a note you have to press the search box twice. First time you just get types of things - if you want to search free text you have to press again.
I'd argue that UI encourages using tags over search.
It's honestly my only major annoyance about Google Keep.
Me: I want a coffee shop.
Maps: Ok let me zoom out and show you coffee shops in a 20km radius.
So you have to zoom back in and “Search this area”. But hey the Starbucks next door is not shown, it’s maddening.
Google’s core business is now ads, not search.
It has been for over 20 years now, since October 2000.
>It's honestly my only major annoyance about Google Keep.
I definitely have more annoyances - it can be slow, it has only minimum features, you can't change the ordering etc.
That's probably why it doesn't suck as badly as most other Google products.
> you can't change the ordering etc.
Of notes? Of checkbox items? In both cases: you most definitely can. I just did that, both in the browser and in the app.
You can reorder them one by one but there's no option to then re-order by last edited or created or ascending or anything. Is there?
Drive search, bookmark search, and Web search are totally different features in totally different products. Notably, the first two have no ads, so driving you to search in this case has no clear positive effect for Google.
Edit: you can and should turn it off in settings: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/assist...
Man, I thought I was going nuts. For a pretty long time now I've just been dumbfounded when no or seemingly arbitrary street names are rendered (usually when I zoom in; when it counts). This happens for all sorts of streets, regardless of their significance. It's slightly insane this still occurs.
And this very aspect is what makes Google Maps not a proper map. It's optimized for point-to-point navigation, where you know the place you want to get to.
This wouldn't have been accidental, it would have been fully your own fault for negligence.
I'll fully admit this is a pedantic tangent but it's been long acknowledged that "accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash (for instance, using an app to navigate instead of being better acquainted with your route ahead of time):
https://laist.com/news/car-crash-accident-traffic-violence-l...
Agree that using phones while driving is generally bad, but implying that it is irresponsible to use turn-by-turn (and suggesting the alternative of just knowing where you are) is just more likely to make people ignore the problem all together.
It isn't irresponsible to use turn-by-turn navigation (and I don't think GP is implying that). It's irresponsible to fiddle with the phone you are using for that purpose while driving.
They wrote:
"...intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash (for instance, using an app to navigate..."
They straight out stated that using navigation predictably leads to crashes and must be regarded as intentional.
So I don't see any way to avoid the conclusion that they think navigation is ethically and practically the same as DUI/DWI.
Don’t distract from the point.
I do take the blame.
I'm driving somewhere 6 hours away that I've never been with a dog in the car. Normally it's quite safe for me to do things like manage turn by turn navigation, and pick up a hands free call, or pause an audiobook, or ask the phone to reroute me to food, gas, or a rest stop.
If you are able to drive solo 6 hours to a new place in total silence without stopping for food, rest, or gas, or touching the turn by turn navigations to make an update, I'll fly you out to me and pay you $1000 a day to teach me how.
I am also able to manage those things without taking my eyes off the road for more than I would looking at my speedometer. If there's a new UI that's new and different, you should have pulled over to figure it out instead of almost crashing not once, but twice.
> I am also able to manage those things without taking my eyes off the road for more than I would looking at my speedometer.
Yea so that would be normal operating procedure for me as well! Definitely I should have pulled over when the severity of the UI change became clear to me, but it was already too late and I was slamming the brakes. I was in the far left lane in bumper to bumper traffic and it wasn't quite as simple as you think it must have been. Can you understand my frustration at needing to do that? I made the wrong choice and I didn't do that. Can you still understand my frustration with the situation?
Since you are so concerned about automobile safety, do you have any suggestion on how to get a taxi/Uber/Lyft/etc driver who keeps at least one hand firmly grasping the steering wheel at all times the car is in motion?
I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days.
Certainly the way laws are written, there is quite a high bar before an "accident" brings the kinds of criminal charges that any other reason for a similar action would trigger. For example, if you kill someone through inattention, that is often charged as involuntary manslaughter, unless you did it with a car and were following traffic laws, in which case it is rarely charged.
As a society we have traditionally come to accept that driving kills lots of people, often but not always at random, and we don't want to be handing out random prison sentences for those with merely bad luck. (Or, at least, without provable blame.)
I suspect there will be backlash, your post is one example.
The link I shared previously (Fonseca, 2020) mentions this:
---
Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident.
You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions.
In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars.
So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation.
In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken."
Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today.
The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.
I'd rather not be responsible for any accident related to google maps, because ultimately, it'd be my fault, and I'd not feel relieved just because google changed its layout.
This is not about excusing the bad pattern of modernizing UI just for the sake of it, just about not relieving myself out of responsibility.
I agree with you, but that ain't a great word either.
I'd like to have a word that also includes did-not-cause-accident-by-luck failures, such as running a red light or failing to notice a bicyclist who slammed brakes to avoid you sideswiping them.
Best I can offer is "incident".
I agree that I as the driver would have been at fault in an accident. Car accident is a really common thing to call it even when the person naming the incident is 100% at fault and knows it. I would have been 100% at fault and I know that.
Still, it's hard not to get frustrated when previously safe activities become unsafe because of a UI update that was ostensibly made to increase safety.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E&ab_channel=Dames...
I get emails from ServiceNow with zero details about the original ticket, I get shell packaging that makes me want to use power tools to open it, I get user interfaces so overran with calls to action that you can't find what you are looking for, no way to use your voice to correct a text while driving, i cant mute audio while the car is in reverse, and the price scanners at my local safe way are so finicky and track that everything is sitting on a scale and any mess up at all and now you need manual intervention as opposed to the self checkout at Walmart where you can just kinda wave your product near the scanner and it finds it and it doesn't yell at you when you put bags in your cart to make room for other purchases, and the list goes on.
Where's the fucking "Report a user interface problem" window???
I have tried OpenStreetMaps (albeit 5+years ago) and couldn't search for an address. So if that's improved I'd like to know.
I don't need/want "find X near me" or fluff like "what restaurant's are open right now?".
All I want is navigation between current location and target address.
There is also a lot of clutter.
These are traits that have all gotten worse over the years. I'd prefer the UI of the first-gen Google Maps then what we have today.
I have no complaints about the actual navigation, there has been quirks over the years but nothing that stands out in my mind.
As far as I know, it doesn't do pathfinding either. A client will have to take the data from OSM and use its own algorithms to navigate.
It is offline - meaning you download the areas you are interested in first, after which all the data is available fully offline (including stuff like directions, metro maps etc). The interface takes a bit to get used to, but the biggest let down is the fact that you can't edit a route in the route planner - you need to start all over again (selecting start/destination, no way to modify either).
[0] - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/ (also available on Play Store)
Does anyone have an idea about the userbase of Bookmarks? Maybe it's actually reallllllly low and this isn't worth anyone but power users' time.
https://www.google.com/bookmarks/
Not giving features for self-organization is a choice.
Google is just trying to help users realize that the web is a bad source for organized information. Google sells expensive clicks to personal injury lawyers off of titanic spam plantations of SEO content —- their mission is orthogonal to the organization of information.
Adding tags has a chance of causing user confusion, UI congestion and impact on existing tools (in the case of Google Drive) so it's not a free thing to do.
Based on the snippet linked, not exactly thst.
For example one of the thing the book says is users of earlier Windows versions used hierarchical structures.
To which I point out: the only alternative wasn't tags but a flat non-hierarchical lack of structure.
Another thing: The Gmail team got it kind of right, they introduced hierarchical tags.
Sometimes one solution is obviously better and you just need to get the knowlegde out.
Other times there are good reasons to keep both: I personally very much want to have both folders and tags.
At no point should one however take the modern ux trick: hide the power tool, use the fact that no one use it anymore as proof that no one wants it and then remove it.
Everything is a tag, why not right? They already have: everything is a list, everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a process. How much “everything is a” failures they need before realizing that these ideas were… obsessions I guess?
Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?
Exactly.
Since my bookmarks use proper tags I just update it once.
If I kept multiple copies in multiple folders I'd have to update multiple bookmarks in multiple folders.
The gulf between this and my own use of bookmarks is so, so vast.
I bookmark because I want to have something as a reference, or come back to it later (especially "bookmark all tabs").
I often think "Maybe I bookmarked this thing that I remember a few details of... hope those details are in the title, or that I happen to recognize the title!"
I often find that I've bookmarked the same site or page multiple times, because when I ran across it, I couldn't easily notice that I already had it saved.
I have 8000+ bookmarks.
https://pinboard.in/u:eitland/
I can mostly find anything I want within a few minutes. Oh, and I pay for archiving so there's a chance I can read it even if the link rots.
If not tags, then SOMETHING.
I do agree with the other comments that if there are some features which solves some real problems[1] even the majority users would use it.
Bookmarks can help solve some new age problems too, I recently found phished website of our Income Tax site as a top result in Google[2] and those using bookmark to visit such sites which we use once a year could have prevented from getting phished.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/57-i-forget-my-web-bookmarks-qu... (Disclaimer: I run this)
[2] https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1409761416865746956
Similarly, when I switched from Google Maps to Apple Maps, the favorites UI was enough better that I started using it more and relying on search less.
There’s definitely a pattern of Google underperforming in ways that make you fall back on Google Search, sending Google data, and viewing Google ads.
I considered polishing it for publication, but I think that what made it so good for me is I made it specific to my needs. Besides, I’m off Chrome now, and they fixed the bug I was using to steal focus from the URL bar to make shortcuts work.