[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.