[mdwelsh]

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."

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.

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.

[mgkimsal]

> ... 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.

They don't seem to have much of a problem EOL-ing products. THAT is often far more disruptive to large swathes of people. Perhaps not billions, but I would hazard to say millions of people have been affected by various product shutdowns, and there's never any rebound from that. Making UI changes can be rolled out to groups of folks with adjustments made on feedback, then further rolled out, or ... scrapped.

[smsx]

Once you EOL a product, you no longer have to support it. Not the same case at all as making changes to a core product and then continuing to support it.

[mgkimsal]

The point seemed to be that they don't want to make big changes because it's "disruptive". But... have no problem being disruptive to millions of end users.

[haecceity]

Google doesn't want to be disruptive when it hurts Google. Disrupting users of a profitable product hurts Google. Disrupting users of an unprofitable product does not hurt Google. Google happy. Google kill unprofitable product.

[harshalizee]

>Google has very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers.

Google has great engineers/employees that their hiring process has naturally selected for a particular types of people. This doesn't necessarily mean good. From what I've seen, Google engineers are amazing at solving hard system/foundational problems but absolutely terrible at making good products.

If you were to create a JIRA ticket asking to solve the traveling salesman problem or the like, you'll probably get a decent implementation by the end of the month before you can get a good well rounded product from Google.

Almost all Google products have regressed substantially since inception in just a few years. Gmail was snappy, quick and and had possibly the best UX in any mail client. Now it takes >20 secs on a broadband connection to give me a white-washed mess of a page with no real discerning advantage over the plain html version.

Google has the same problems and challenges you mentioned as any high scale, widely used large corp like Microsoft, Facebook, etc. has. The only difference is that the others go through periods of good-bad UX due to fast pivots, experimentation and luck.

What's the point of having these immensely talented employees if the culture/system can't actually leverage them to design something good?

The reality is that Google was a ground breaking company that rocketed to the moon, made a ton of money due to ads and now hoping to get lucky again by throwing things at a wall to see what sticks.

Google culture is now a highly risk-averse decision process system. It's the new IBM.

[tacker2000]

>Gmail was snappy, quick and and had possibly the best UX in any mail client. Now it takes >20 secs on a broadband connection to give me a white-washed mess of a page with no real discerning advantage over the plain html version.

Spot on.

As soon as i started seeing the “a new version of gmail is coming soon, click here to try it” banner, i knew that the end of my great gmail experience was nigh.

It’s funny because i NEVER even had the slightest doubt that the new UI would be shittier, and it turned out to be just like i expected it.

Gmail got big due to their extremely snappy ui and is now used by people who cant be arsed to migrate, like is the case with yahoo mail.

And every other google ui is getting worse every week.

To the googlers here, please show me a product where the UI has actually improved and is not just a whitespace inferno.

[coffeeling]

> Gmail got big due to their extremely snappy ui

They also gave 1-2GB of storage back before Dropbox existed (predates Dropbox by 3 years) and other free webmails gave a some megabytes. It was a far superior mail-files-to-yourself platform than anything else on the market.

[tarboreus]

They also did this with Google Voice before they axed it. The original Gmail was such a tight app, I still quite miss it. Next thing they're going to make it harder to get your emails in and out and I'll be done with them.

[zenexer]

Google Voice is back. They forced everyone off of Voice and over to Hangouts; now, they’re forcing everyone back.

[anderspitman]

I've been using gvoice as my primary phone number for 10 years. The UI has certainly had it's ups and downs, but I wouldn't say it's ever been "axed".

[barkingcat]

I think while yes, UI changes does take a lot of care, I think it is a matter of "Google, you are made out of money. Fix your fucking interfaces."

If one of the richest companies on the planet can't pay to hire good designers, and just pay to buyout a whole ecosystem (ie what they did with AMP), then no one can.

Rather, I think your points aside, it's a matter of executive direction and attention. Google executives doesn't give a damn about good UI. They have all the money in the world, but won't spend it on proper improvements to UI and product interfaces.

You can argue until your face is blue that the people at Google are great, very talented, but unfortunately ... if the execs don't buy into it all these talented designers/engineers are just twiddling their thumbs and making design mocks that will never see the light of day.

Or as the saying goes: have their product cancelled once they make it a good product.

[astrange]

Do they even know it’s bad? Google has approximately no way to report issues in anything.

I assume they have telemetry for some things. Whenever I sign into Hangouts I have to report hundreds of porn spam chats I’ve been added to - they should be seeing that. Aren’t doing anything about it though.

[jitl]

I find feedback buttons on most Google properties actually

[tarboreus]

They seem to be hooked up to a digital circular file. I've submitted probably ten of these and never gotten a follow up. Their forums where you can request help and note issues are infuriating, they have some low level person come in and annoy the asker with canned responses and irrelevances. Google is where customer service goes to die, then have its body exhumed and desecrated.

[temikus]

“making design mocks that will never see the light of day”

This seems accurate. I worked with UX teams on Cloud a lot. They _are_ brilliant. But every time the lifecycle seems to be:

1) They come out with fantastic mocks. 2) They run this by some internal committee and the design gets degraded. 3) Repeat step 2 10-20 times. 4) The final result is tiny incremental changes that look like the original UI was slightly re-shaped. 5) Rinse, repeat.

[marcosdumay]

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback

Somehow, that doesn't stop companies from breaking they UX, only from fixing it.

Most of the Google software started with good usability (gmail, drive, search, maps). It got horrendous by changing.

[vibrolax]

They started with good usability, because that was a primary goal before financial considerations became more important.

[inetknght]

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.

Sure you can. Empower your users instead of taking features away. Make it modular with the default modules being the old interface. Make reporting spam actually useful instead of feeling like it gets ignored. Make it easier to manage a list of _thousands_ of filters. Provide better IMAP integration instead of the half-implemented crap that it is right now. Hell, just make it so that I can encrypt my emails.

Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users. You don't have to break things to provide new features.

[oblio]

> Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users. You don't have to break things to provide new features.

Do you work in software development?

1. With that many users, you are going to break something for someone. Probably for tens of millions of someones, at the minimum.

2. At some point you will have to break something. Some of the new stuff will be incompatible with the old stuff. No one has a crystal ball.

[inetknght]

> Do you work in software development?

I've written software for over 20 years. C++ mostly, a lot of Python, some Xojo.

> With that many users, you are going to break something for someone. Probably for tens of millions of someones, at the minimum.

Maybe. I don't think it's a given though.

> At some point you will have to break something. Some of the new stuff will be incompatible with the old stuff. No one has a crystal ball.

Why? At no point does making something modular have to break something. Usually when something breaks during modularization it's because it was already broken and modularization simply made it need to get fixed.

[remus]

> Serious blowback happens when you break something for some segment of your users.

When you have a billion users changing literally anything breaks things for some portion of your users.

[vendiddy]

Agree here. Google could create a better UI that connects to their same backend and let users try I it out. Doesn't mean they have to break the existing UI.

It must have something to do with management but would be curious from an insider what is going on.

[egsmi]

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.

What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.

[bigtones]

Microsoft faced significant blowback for that ribbon change, and billions of dollars were spend on re-training hundreds of millions of office workers to do it. Because that change was in desktop software - users had the option of just sticking with the old version (which millions of users did) but you can't really do that with web applications.

[robertlagrant]

Course you can. Just have an opt-in new UI. Confluence has done that really well, for example. CircleCI have been doing it.

Sometimes I'd love to work at Google to really understand how it works. I'm sure change is hard, but I can't understand why from the outside.

[mosfets]

Once you have worked with a product doing these kind of things, you'll understand you'll need to double or even triple the efforts to be able to support two branches of the same feature. Of course this doesn't apply to simple applications.

[robertlagrant]

Yes, I know.

If you're implying Google can't afford it but CircleCI can, then while I understand your logic, I disagree with your understanding of reality.

If you're not, then I disagree with your understanding of logic.

[oblio]

Confluence removed quite a few features from the new UI.

I don't know Circle CI but they probably have 2 orders of magnitude fewer users. Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.

[robertlagrant]

> Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.

Well regardless, they still pulled off the harder technique.

[bigtones]

That Atlassian Confluence model you gave had some serious issues, they they are going to turn off the option to keep the old UI as well, and it is an enormous strain on Engineering resources to keep two different versions of an entire application UI up to date.

One company that had done this a bit better was Salesforce with the old UI / Lightening UI switch.

[robertlagrant]

Yeah but it's necessary. The old UI would cause people to leave; the new one is actually really good.

[cbozeman]

This comment is both simultaneously sad and hilarious.

[egsmi]

Why can't one stick with the old UI with a web application? That's an implementation choice Google makes.

[nefitty]

Doesn’t that double the support surface? Bugs are still going to pop-up in the old interface, and so do you still tackle those or move engineer focus to the new interface? It seems weird to continue spending engineer time on an interface that is being phased out.

[remus]

There's still threads on hacker news today bemoaning the ribbon UI and harking back to the good old days of drop down menus, and how great it was to be a power user back then. If you're after an example of a UI change with minimal blowback then I think this is a poor example!

[egsmi]

I didn't say anything about minimizing blow back. I agreed that there will be blow back. But life moves on.

[pas]

Exactly. Every Facebook design change was decried loudly. Then no one really gave a single faint fuck about it in a few weeks.

[alphakappa]

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.

And yet, Gmail keeps getting redesigned every so often to the point where it's hard to figure out how basic stuff works. This is a hard argument to buy.

*It took me a decent amount of time to figure out how to add users to cc/bcc. This sort of stuff, which was easy to do in the 90s shouldn't become harder every year.

[me551ah]

Facebook is exactly in the same boat , but they have redesigned the user interface multiple times over the years. Even after so many years, Facebook still feels current.

[snowwrestler]

Google has also redesigned their UIs several times over the same period of time.

I think a lot of big-product UI complaints come down to: different people want different things.

The more popular a product is, the more people the company has to satisfy. It’s just simple math that as a product grows, so does the chance that some vocal people will disagree with how it evolves.

I can’t think of a mass-market software product with a UI that everyone loves. You can find UI complaints about any of them—including Facebook and Google.

[forgot-my-pw]

Facebook breaks things so often. I used to be quite active in Facebook marketplace as a seller and every week there will be a broken feature that does not get fixed until months after. Be it something small like missing link to photo gallery not working at all.

Sure, they have newer UI, but the stability of their features is poor.

[fakedang]

Tbh I find the current FB UI to be very user hostile. The current layout seems unnatural. Granted, I don't use FB that often nowadays either.

[stingraycharles]

That’s not the point. The point is that UI changes can be done to large audiences if you want to, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. I’d actually argue that the fact that FB’s “improvements” are actually user hostile is an even stronger case that user friendly UX improvements can definitely be done.

[caminocorner]

> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback.

Of course there is, therre's always someone who will be upset. The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent, despite any research or the well paid "very good UX designers, UX researchers, product managers, and engineers."

[catwind7]

> The problem is they've kept making it worse and worse to unanimous dissent

Where's your data on "unanimous dissent"? Also, there's often a silent majority of your products where people are totally happy with it and have zero complaints. You don't want to accidentally cater to the loud minority.

It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better". Knowing exactly what most of your users want is hard for everyone, even google.

[zentiggr]

> It's not as simple as saying "well, someones gonna be upset but we should do it anyway because we know better".

Yeah, it is. That's exactly what Google does. All the time.

[stingraycharles]

Exactly. What happened, especially with Gmail, is that over time it consistently got worse and worse and worse. It went with small changes, but overall they all add up.

Now, we’re asking to make these changes go into a better direction. Surely we’re not asking for a massive overhaul in one big chunk, but many incremental changes, just like Google and any large organization for that matter has been doing for dozens of years.

[richardfey]

You have just described ossification and risk-averse decision processes.

[setr]

With google maps at least, there’s been a decent number of sudden UI/UX changes that completely revamp the layout and features (often towards something less useful) — which indicates to me that there’s not that much of a struggle internally with the idea

[kentlyons]

"Being boxed in" - I think this is the crux of the point. It is being defensive with respect to the current position. Good design might need to consider the legacy, but rarely should be constrained by it. However in many situations an org can't really make these decisions and it takes a senior executive to own the decision that might cause near term blow back, but also enable escaping the local optima to a better one.

[pier25]

Makes sense.

OTOH why the complete revamp of Gmail's UI in 2018 or so instead of a gradual one?

Why start new chat apps from scratch every time?

Why kill Inbox?

[denimnerd42]

This is a very good point that once your software has a UI/UX and good adoption it's very painful to change it. Personally I despise when UI/UX changes to my daily software as my muscle memory is so honed in on how to do the work quickly. Frankly I don't care if it's optimal or not because it's completely suboptimal once the change is made and I have to spend the 2 weeks relearning it.

I'm not sure what the solution is to this problem. Maybe some day we can treat any UI with a long availability promise and continuously version it. Then the user can stick with their current version as long as it makes sense to them and if they want to upgrade they can do so voluntarily.

[mulmen]

Except this ignores reality where Google has consistently made UX worse. Remember when Google search actually remembered your preferences? Or when you could set blocked domains in the account instead of only in their browser?

Or the complete overhauls of UIs?

[zeku]

I use chrome on android and it seems to work well for me. I don't understand what the issue is with that particular product. In fact I'm struggling to think of a google product I use that feels dated.

[uHuge]

Home button? No simple copy from the URL field? Not in a share with menus unlike Firefox…

[fomine3]

IMO current OmniBar UI on Chrome Android is great improvement. Mostly we just search, sometimes copy the URL, rarely edit URL. So they made search as default and made an option to copy/edit URL.

[andromeduck]

If they just kept inbox as Gmail beta it would have been so much better. Like have a core and a new app. Sunset the old UI a after a few years.

We should have a fast track and a slow and steady track.

[imbnwa]

I'm curious about this as well, I work at some feature factory and have been desensitized to people not really grasping iterative development of anything or just the words migrate, migration or gradually, but I find it hard to believe this would be the case at Google. Perhaps there's data we don't have that points out the impedance.

[freewilly1040]

Why does e.g. Inbox have to be forced on everyone? Google has a world-scale user base, why is it critical that we all use the same interface?

[pradn]

Google Maps stutters often on the latest iPhone Pro, which has the best mobile processor. It's not necessary to change the UI to make it work better. Is it an organizational difficulty in getting performance work prioritized? Or does it simply not matter since people don't have a better option available.

[lern_too_spel]

Maybe that was the case in mobile Chrome, which isn't that bad. Many other products have had bewildering UI changes just for the sake of UI changes or have even been completely replaced by other products that look entirely different. Look at the communications products from Google or the music products for recent examples.

Worse, all of these products share a cpetent-looking feedback system that is completely ignored. Recently, I've seen humans responding to poor reviews in the Play Store asking for the feedback to be submitted via the in-product feedback, but everybody knows that's a black hole. If anybody actually looked at the feedback submitted that way, Google would allocate an engineer to combining feedback from the Play Store into that system instead of responding on the Play Store with pretend interest.

[sg47]

Actually Google does this all the time. They just simply change the UX and features for products for seemingly no reason. e.g on Android, when I want to save a link to Pocket, I'd use the share button and it'd pop a list of all the apps I could share to. Now that has disappeared and has been replaced with a smaller list of apps(4-5) and the most recently used app to share or the most frequently used (pocket in either case) is not on this list. I have to scroll to the right and click on more apps.

Another example - on Android the pull down settings menu has now changed such that the list of apps is again restricted. I have to pull it twice to see the full list.

I've been holding onto Android for a while now but Google is trying their best to make me to iOS.

[bloodorange]

While you say "for seemingly no reason", somewhere there is a team happy that an A/B experiment has shown the change to move some metrics (which they care about and perhaps aids the team-member(s') goal(s) of being promoted) in the direction they desire. It's a thing of beauty when the metrics align with the interest of the user but this of course is secondary to the profit motive.

[dafoex]

The need to incrementally change UI/UX is both a blessing and a curse, not only from a usability perspective but an aesthetic one, too. Since I use it a fair bit, I'll use Android as an example: I generally learn a new UI pretty fast, but there are still things from Holo and earlier that I miss. Also, Material Design that was mentioned in the post is a generally good thing in my opinion, but as they've tried to incorporate new widgets and things into it, its become more and more clunky to use and fugly to look at, and I personally blame incremental changes for MD 2 being shoehorned into MD 1.

[ps747]

I really appreciate this point, and I wonder if this is a flaw of the continuously updated model of cloud-based software. While it integrates with AGILE and bugs are (in theory) quickly fixed, there's much harder to make breaking changes. Contrast that to the versioned software model where Microsoft Word could make major changes like introducing the ribbon. I wonder if it's a good idea to do some sort of versioning in the cloud-based setting.

[birdsbirdsbirds]

> Startups like Notion have a great deal of flexibility to tweak and innovate on their UX

Isn't it the other way round? For small start-ups, making disruptive changes is dangerous because losing important customers would kill the company whereas Google has the momentum to establish any change they want to make.

Start-ups still make disruptive changes because venture capital is eager to win big.

[catwind7]

This is a great answer - and this doesn't just affect products with hundreds of millions of users. It's a classic case of Innovators Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma).

[cjblomqvist]

If you've read the research properly behind the Innovators Dilemma - I'd argue it's not such a case. CCs theory on disruption might be the most misused and overhyped stuff I've ever come to research. (did my MSc thesis on it, with support from a professor whose main research area was disruption...) - unless there are underlying new technological paradigm shifts underpinning those UX changes, but I doubt that.

This is a case of Google not seeing the cost/benefit equation being positive between changing the UX from it's current UXs to some other ones (within the same technological paradigm).

Sure, it might be a case of resource dependence and a lack of will to "start over". But that doesn't imply disruption as described by CC (at least not originally)

[catwind7]

I see - just curious, in what way is it mostly misused and can you be specific about how I've misuse it? I'm still not convinced I've misused it but would like to know so I don't do it again

[sigsergv]

> 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.

Then why google change (not minor) things and make them much worse than before?

[thiht]

> look at Inbox, for example

What about it? It was awesome until it was killed for no reason.

Of course it was not widely used, at no point was it promoted as much as it would have deserved.

And even if it's not widely used, so what? It was already perfect. What is so bad about proposing multiple competing UIs for the same service?

[stickfigure]

I would believe this narrative... except for the god-awful indistinguishable new icons they just rolled out. Clearly the branding department runs the show over there.

[coffeeling]

Notion's userbase is also largely high-IQ techies obsessed with new, fancy, trendy stuff. They'd hate no change more than constant change.

[loftyal]

Why can't they support multiple interfaces? Allow people to switch to one if they like

[sigzero]

Facebook does it and they mostly suck at it too. At that level, you just make the changes.