| - Navigation: A sidebar that doesn't scale with their growing offering. Dozens of services stacked in a scrollable sidebar. - Hierarchy: A lack of hierarchy concepts and the overall feeling that everything is scattered around. No clear defined boundaries between entities. For example, they have something called API Library, which for some weird reason, seems to be the default path to enable things that are required in specific service consoles. Also, the way they compartmentalize things. Why is there a section in the sidebar that reads "Products" and then there are other sections at the same hierarchy level like "Compute"..aren't the services under Compute products as well? -Discoverability: Very poor discoverability across all services. For example, go down the path of enabling one of their flagship services like Google Vision. The expected path would be something like entering the console > going to the sidebar > Finding Vision > Enabling API. Does it work like that? Nope. There's only a link to the documentation that explains how to enable it. - Visibility: Ok. Staying with the Vision example. Now I want to see my usage of this API. It would make sense to see this data inside that console. Is it there? Nope. You have to go back and start hunting down where to find this information. Apparently they expect you to know that this lives under the API console, but there's no way to know this especially if you used the CLI or one of the "Enable Buttons" within the documentation. Maybe they thought those were useful, but they just break the learnability of the platform. I could keep going...but you get the idea. This is not usable. I don't blame them either, to be honest. Even Google and Amazon have limited resources and the UX is a low priority for them since the value proposition is coming from other areas (security, reliability, offering range, price, etc)... but I feel as this space matures this is gonna become an area where the legacy of their poor decisions will generate issues down the road. |
The search within console is fantastic for finding things quickly.
I have yet to find a platform that doesn't have some amount of learning curve.