[tanilama]

I don't think I agree with you here.

Make Cloud UI fast is probably not their priority. This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. They will wait.

Integrity/Security would be much higher on the list than UI loading speed.

Not surprising at all.

[whywhywhywhy]

>This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI.

Shouldn't this be the opposite? Maybe this is just me but if I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere.

[choathedolls]

Not the opposite, but we're missing the simple fact that enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. There are constantly clients bringing their demands for additional features or major fixes, very rarely are they "please optimize the UI". For consumer facing products, that's not really the case, unless some massive features are missing, they would rather things be snappy as they tend to be extremely distracted at all times so dropping your app/site/whatever is no big deal.

During work, what else are you going to do if Cloud UI is slow besides just wait? Go through the entire process of trying to convince management to make a switch because UI is a little clunky? Good luck with that!

[dmitriid]

> enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations.

I've been using logs, bigquery, dataflow, and a smattering of other products pretty regularly for the past few years.

Are these products getting "more features"? Hardly. Well, dataflow deprecates minor SDK versions every month, so you have to run twice as fast just to stay in one place.

Instead, they have been redesigning the logs interface with fancy animations. And for the longest time ever they removed features from it like streaming logs.

Meanwhile the minor stupid things like displaying dates in MM/DD/YYYY format in date pickers, using AM/PM for time? Oh, they stay on. Graphs that work half of the time and you can never know if they are broken, cached, or just don't work? Oh, they stay on.

It's Google's systemic organisational failure: they suck at UIs, they don't care, and they couldn't be bothered to maintain features because "oooh, shiny new thing looks better on my resume".

[tracker1]

I don't entirely agree... Material Design is pretty great imho and I like most of their UI choices (for applications that seem to sometimes get priority).

I think what this comes down to, is that their best technical minded developers are busy working on tooling, platforms, systems or other lower-level development. Their best design focused developers on public facing applications. This tends to leave the most junior of developers working on internally facing developer UIs. The payloads themselves are irresponsibly large on this application to say the least, and the ability/skill and understanding needed to make it better are probably not within the team(s) working on this UI to begin with.

Personally, I absolutely hate Angular and it's ironic that Angular's chosen primary UI toolkit @angular/material gets roughly half the downloads of the third party material-ui for react. Not even counting boostrap adapters.

Most web applications can easily be done in JS with an initial JS payload of ~500k-1mb (download size, compressed), with code splitting can have payloads for different areas/components come up as needed. Charts is probably the biggest beast that is practically impossible to tame, there have been a few times that I just generate the SVG directly in a React component to save the overhead of using a charting library, which is surprisingly easy to do.

[dmitriid]

Material UI is ... well. It just is. It's mediocre at best, and hilariously bad at worst:

- Insufficient contrast everywhere https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA

- Inconsistent use of their own guidelines: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 (references the old design of the site, but the new one is just as bad)

- Bad physical metaphors: https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9

- Or the hilarious story where they needed a user study involving 600 people to tell them that if a text field doesn't look like a text field, people won't be able to tell it's a text field: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...

And that's just off the top of my head.

But all of that could be forgiven if Google bothered or cared. They don't.

[tracker1]

I know that some of the details above are worth calling out. In terms of usability, it's important and that is as much an implementation detail as it is a design guideline detail.

Regarding the buttons, I agree they should elevate on hover and press down... with the animation for the click radial effect. Touch interfaces with just the radial click indication.

For the survey/study, I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. Actually interviewing with people to determine what works best should be actively encouraged.

This also isn't to say that I think google proper really cares all that much. I'm pretty sure their UX designers are treated like second class citizens in their engineer focused culture, let alone those that cross between UI/UX and engineering.

I also want to differentiate between "Material Design" the guidelines and "Material UI" the react component library. It's probably the single best component library I've ever worked with, which isn't saying too much as it's not perfect, just better than anything else I've seen.

edit: the main point was that Google's blessed implementation for their UI design framework is less used than a third party implementation for another framework.

[sam0x17]

I think it's more that people care about the speed of the actual cloud offering, not the internal control panel. The product isn't the control panel, it's the cloud services.

[jynelson]

This is such a depressing take. "I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!"

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

They're not saying it's ok. They are saying that the overall system (the business-business-management-employee complex) prevents optimization of this UI from being a priority.

[trhway]

>"I'm at work for 8 hours a day so it's ok if some time is wasted, there's plenty of it!"

that is how enterprise employers treat their employees. The time is wasted everywhere. Slow Google UI is just a one item in the long list, so no one of those enterprise customers would give Google a headache over it.

[tanilama]

> I have to use something to do my actual job and it take more time that it should because of the UI I'd look elsewhere

The one who made the decision to use GCP would not be the one who would use it actually. If GCP offers a bigger cut than other Cloud providers, loading time would be irrelevant in that optics.

Enterprise users are risk averse. Speed is definitely a plus, but they would care more about stability/predictability than anything.

[m12k]

Only if you have a choice. Most people don't have a choice of what tools to use, they are dictated by their employer. And employers may have other priorities (e.g. checking off "serverless" on their bullshit-bingo-card before the next board meeting)

[blibble]

they don't care about the opinion of the people using the awful UI, they care about the executives signing the contract after being wined and dined

[chrisandchris]

Tell that to the guys at Atlassian, the worlds slowest web application...

The people making the decision aren‘t not often the ones who need to work with the product.

[snovv_crash]

At least the new JIRA workflows are faster than the old one...

[gnopgnip]

People who use this product largely don't interact with the web ui, a lot of things are only done occasionally. And the people that use it frequently won't use the web ui, command line tools or a third party program that abstracts that away is more likely.

Also the AWS web ui has a lot of the same problems, so switching vendors wouldn't just fix the problem

[andruby]

Can you look elsewhere? Most _users_ of Google Cloud are not the decision makers and can't move to, say, AWS.

Consumers can more easily make that choice since they're not part of a hierarchy.

[EGreg]

I must say after using Microsoft Teams...

M$ is back, baby. I would invest in them if I invested in huge-market-cap companies.

After IBM, Microsoft became the company selling Windows and Office for businesses. Huge cash cow. They lost that for a while due to the iPhone and Google and stuff moving to the Web and mobile.

Now they’re back.

The fonts and aesthetics remind me of using Windows apps 20 years ago. This ain’t Google. Small, crisp verdana, tahoma or whatever.

Meetings done right. Office - Word, Excel - integrated. Tons of plugin support.

Compared to Slack, this is way better. And compared to Google Suite, well... Teams is faster and actually feels like a product teams would live in day-in and day-out. No need for slack, zoom, gmail and a hodgepodge of other things.

Microsoft also has a huge cache of businesses who would literally onboard their entire company and pay monthly recurring revenues. They have successfully gotten back into the Microsoft Office business.

Except this time it’s recurring revenues and on the mobile too. Even if Microsoft doesn’t sell mobile devices. They are going to eclipse Google with businesses if Google keeps doing its cute slow Web based interfaces, imho.

And I say this as a person who has not used Windows for 15 years, who hardly ever used Office or Office 360 until literally trying Teams as part of a consulting gig.

It’s amazing. And it’s very Microsoft.

[robertlagrant]

> Compared to Slack, this is way better

Try scrolling up in Teams. I'll wait.

Now do it in Slack - 10 times quicker, and thus usable.

[sam0x17]

On the flipside though, try doing a video chat in Slack.. Not exactly an ideal experience

[robertlagrant]

Agree. But try doing a video call in a channel in a team in Teams, and watch everyone in the team join, not just the people in the channel. At that point you won't miss just starting Zoom so much.

[robertlagrant]

Especially when you can just /zoom from inside Slack, in fact.

[Whinner]

Try doing a screenshare in Slack. You can't, you have to connect a voicecall before you can share your screen.

Now do it in Teams. You can share your screen without completing a voicecall.

[bombela]

The moment you find slack to be faster than something else. You know we have reached the absolute rock bottom.

I have to use both Slack and the Google Cloud UI at work. RIP.

[tracker1]

I happen to like MS Teams a lot... was very happy to see Linux getting proper support earlier this year, similar for o365. If you run a company with more than a handful of users, worth the price of entry imo.

[mc32]

I don't know. GSuite admin panels used to be pretty fast in the early days --now it can become frustrating to use.

[908B64B197]

I also wonder how often the UI is used vs the command line.

[claydavisss]

The UI is the primary management interface, log search interface, and in certain cases, analytics interface.