Summarizer

I wish Google would be biased a little more towards quality and performance. Their user-facing products tend to be full of jank, although Gmail is quite good to be fair. In general I think the "ship fast and break things" mentality assumes a false dilemma, as if the alternative to shipping broken software is to not ship at all. If thats the mentality no wonder software sucks today. I'd rather teams shipped working, correct, and performant software even if it meant delaying additional features or shipping a constrained version of their vision. The minimalism of the software would probably end up being a net benefit instead of stuffing it full of half baked features anyways.

Yeah if only Google shipped more crap software that they then go onto cancel, their software would be so much better!!!!!

Not looking to dismiss the authors long tenure at a major tech company like Google, but the first point kind of stuck like a sore thumb. If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse. Every single one of their services is a pain to use, with unnecessary steps, clicks - basically everything you are trying to do needs a click of sorts. Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. Most of the rest of his lessons while valuable in their own right, are not something I would put under the headline of "after X years at <insert-major-tech-company>", as they do not quite seem to be that different from lessons you pick up at other companies ? I´d more interested to hear about how the culture was impacted when the bean-counters took over and started entshittifying the company for both the users and the employees too.

Well, the 101 idiom comes from US education, it's a reference to the introductory course. Part of the problem with anti-abuse work is that there's no course you can take and precious little inter-firm job hopping. Anti-abuse is a cost of business so you don't see companies competing over employees with experience like you do in some other areas like AI research. So it's all learning-by-doing and when people leave, the experience usually leaves with them. After leaving Google the anti-abuse teams at a few other tech companies did reach out. There was absolutely no consistency at all. Companies varied hugely in how much effort and skill they applied to the problem, even within the same markets. For payment fraud there is a lot of money at stake so I'd expect eBay would have had a good team, but most products at Google didn't lose money directly if there was abuse. It just led to a general worsening of the UX in ways that were hard to summarize in metrics.

I think that's more "this sounds great" than "our users are developers". Google's services also aren't aimed at developers, the APIs are often very bureaucratic and not very well done (there's no way to list the available google sheets documents in the sheets api, I need the drive API and a different set of permissions? please.) It reads exactly like what you'd expect from a "I want to be considered a thought leader" person: nothing you haven't read a hundred times but it sounds nice so you can nod along.

> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users, I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much Ok, I mean this sincerely. You must never have used Microsoft tools. They managed to get their productivity suite into schools 30 years ago to cover UX issues, even now the biggest pain of moving away is the fact that users come out of school trained on it. That also happens to be their best UX. Azure? Teams? PowerBI? It's a total joke compared to even the most gnarly of google services (or FOSS tools, like Gerrit).

I do agree with you. Teams are a cancer and Azure UI sucks too. I do not use much MS products since essentially Win7 I have mainly used Linux as my work environment. But one thing MS used to be good at at least, was the documentation. If you are that old, you will remember each product came with extensive manuals AND there was an actual customer support. With google its like...not even that.

I hate Microsoft with the passion of a thousand burning stars, yet even I still think Google products have worse UX than their Microsoft counterparts. MS Teams is definitely terrible. But I’d take that over Google Meets. Google Docs isn’t even remotely as good as Office 365. And Azure, for all its many faults, is still less confusing than GCP. Thankfully I seldom have to touch either other these companies half-baked UIs.

> I’d take [teams] over Google Meets What? Why? Honestly your entire comment is almost exact polar opposite to how I feel. GCP Makes total sense if you know anything about systems administration, Google docs is limited for things like custom fonts (IE; not gonna happen) but it's simple at least and I can give people a link to click and it's gonna look the same for them. But, honestly, the Teams one is baffling. I can't think of a single thing Meet does worse than Teams.

Yeah that seriously whiplashed me too, I'm genuinely confused. Google Meets has always worked completely fine for me, good performance, works well on mobile, Firefox, etc. Nothing special but it works. Probably my favorite of all the meeting apps. Teams meanwhile is absolutely my least favorite, takes forever to load, won't work in Firefox, nags me to download the app, confusing UI. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like teams.

I've used Meet a few times for video calls and I was amazed at how poorly it worked given the amount of resources Google has at their disposal. I've never had a good video call on Meets. I've had a few Meet calls where over time the resolution and bitrate would be reduced to such a low point I couldn't even see the other person at all (just a large blocky mess). Whereas Teams (for all its flaws) normally has no major issues with the video quality. Teams isn't without its flaws and I do occassionally fall back to ZOom for larger group video calls but at the end of the day Teams video calling sort of just works fine. Not great but not terrible either. YMMV of course.

It's not just Google, the UX is degrading in... Well everything. I think it's because companies are in a duopole, monopole etc position. They only do what the numbers tell them. Nothing else and UX just does not matter anymore. It's like those gacha which make billions. Terrible games, almost zero depth, but people spend thousands in them. Not because they are good, but because they don't have much choice ( similar game without gacha) and part the game loop is made for addiction and build around numbers.

To offer some additional causes for the degradation of UX: 1. An increasing part of industry profits started coming from entertainment (or worse, psychological exploitation) instead of selling the customer a useful tool . For example, good budgeting-software has to help the user understand and model and achieve a goal, while a "good" slot-machine may benefit from confusion and distraction and a giant pull-handle. 2. "Must work on a touchscreen that fits in a pocket" support drags certain things to a lowest common denominator. 3. UX as a switching-cost for customers has started happening more on a per-product rather than a per-OS basis. Instead of learning the Windows or Mac "way" of screens and shortcuts, individual programs--especially those dang Electron apps--make their own reinventions of the wheel.

> Recently I was writing an e-mail and noticed I misspelled the e-mail address of the recipient, which I rarely do. So, I should just be able to click the address and edit it quickly, right? Wrong - now you have a popup menu and inside of it you have to search for "edit e-mail" option. I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX. Clicking the email address brings up a menu with options for other actions, which presumably get used more often. If, instead, you right-click the email address, the option to edit it is right there (last item on the bottom, "Change email address"). I don't see this as a huge penalty given that, as you said, it's rarely used. There's also the "X" to the right of the email address, which you can use to delete it entirely, no extra clicks required.

> I just tested this out and I don't think that's a particularly good example of bad UI/UX Luckily for both you and me, we dont have to rely on our feelings of what is good UX or not. There are concrete UX metholodogies such as Hierarchical Task Analysis or Heuristic Evaluation. These allow us to evaluate concrete KPIs, such as number of steps and levels of navigation required for an action, in order to evaluate just how good or bad (or better said, complicated a UX design is). Lets say we apply the HTA. Starting from the top of your navigation level when you want to execute the task, count the number of operations and various levels of navigation you have to go through with the new design, compared to just clicking and correcting the e-mail address in-place? How much time does it take you to write your e-mail in the both cases? How many times do you have to switch back and forth between the main interface and the context menu google kindly placed for us? Now, phase out of your e-mail writing window and evaluate how many various actions you can execute in the Google Workspace. Most of them are likely to have a few quirks like this. Now multiply the estimated number of actions with the number of quirks and you will slowly start to see the immense cognitive load the average user has to face in using, or shall I rather say "combating" the google products' UX.

I think your particular Gmail issue exists because they want mobile web and touch screen web users (there are dozens of us!) to be able to tap the recipient to show the user card, like hover does for mouse users. To support your usecase (click to directly edit recipient), touch, click, and hover need to have different actions, which may upset some other users. Unless you mean double click to edit, which I would support. I save my energy for more heinous UX changes. For example, the YouTube comment chyron has spoiled so many videos for me and is just so generally obnoxious.

And material UI is still the worst of all UIs. Had the pleasure of rolling out a production oauth client ... jesus christ. Only worse is microsoft in UX. You don't want me to use your services, do you?

> And material UI is still the worst of all UIs I'm not sure how that got approved either, but at least we now know what would happen if a massive corporation created a UI/UX toolkit, driven only by quantitative analytics making every choice for how it should be, seemingly without any human oversight. Really is the peak of the "data-driven decisions above all" era.

What makes me wonder even more: why is this still in place? Someone must've noticed themselves when using it

I was also surprised to read this. I have terrible problems with all Google UIs. I can never find anything and it's an exercise in frustration to get anywhere.

There is a lot of nuance to their point. They are saying, in the long run, career wise, focusing on the actual user matters and makes your projects better. Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. More that, if you follow the user what you are doing can be grounded and it makes your project way more likely to succeed. I would even argue that in many cases it bucks the trend. The author even pointed out, in essence there is a graveyard of internal projects that failed to last because they seemed cool but did nothing for the user.

> Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. Interesting, so he was not, contrary to the blog title, writing on the basis of his 14 years of experience at Google?

Read their point 1 carefully. They are saying, when you are building something or trying to solve a problem (for internal or external users) if you follow the user obsessively you will have a far better outcome that aligns with having impact and long term success. This does imply thinking about UX, but transitively, IMO.

I am not sure I follow - is he, or is he not, writing about his experiences from 14 years at Google? The title suggests he does, yet you suggest that he does not?

The short answer is that the UI isn’t optimized for users like you. I haven’t worked for Google specifically, but at this scale everything gets tested and optimized. I would guess they know power users like you are frustrated, but they know you’ll figure it out anyway. So the UX is optimized for a simpler target audience and possibly even for simpler help documents, not to ensure power users can get things done as quickly as possible.

I feel like you're giving too much credit here. I don't know if it was a leak or an urban legend, but I remember the awful win 8 "flat boxes UI" being that way because it could be designed by managers in PowerPoint that way

The specific feature in question...there is nothing "power" about it. It was a non-feature for decades essentially, I dont recall ever not being able to simply change an e-mail address by moving the cursor and typing in something else. How on earth is this something tested and optimised, for whom exactly?

Google UI seemingly is optimized for happy path cases. Search for the obvious word and click a relevant link on the screen which appears. Write a single response to a single email and abandon than conversation afterwards, always use new conversations for every new email. Click a recommended video thumbnail on the frontpage and then continue with autoplay. Put only short defined text type in the cells of a spreadsheet, like date/number/text etc. And so on with all of their products. But as soon as user tries to search for something no on the first page, or reply to a 10-20+ message thread with attachments in history, or tries to use playlists or search in YT, or input a slightly more complex data in the sheet cells - then all hell breaks loose. Just the latest Google thing I've experienced - a default system Watch Later playlist is now hidden on Android. It's gone, no traces, no way to search for it. The only remnant of it is a 2-second popup after adding a new video to Watch Later, you can press "view" and then see it. Meanwhile it is still present as a separate item on PC. I'm writing this eaxmple because that was deliberate, that was no error or regression. Someone created a Jira for that and someone resolved it.

This is definitely an edge case. Most UI/UX from Google is very consistent and just works. Otherwise they won't be in this market. Only UI/UX issue is that most experienced users want to not adapt to change. It is like people always telling Windows 7 is the best. Don't keep reinventing. Another one that irks me is every UI/UX dev assumes people have 2 x 4K monitors and menu items overflow.

> Only UI/UX issue is that most experienced users want to not adapt to change Users will not only adapt, but will even champion your changes if they make sense to said users. For example the web checkout or to name a more drastic example, iPhone and fingers as user interface devices. Once you start convincing the users that the interface is great, but they are too resistant to changes/dumb/uncreative to know how use it... its a different story I´d reckon ;)

which company's product has great UX? I'm always seeing people hating on things without showcasing examples of what they think is exemplary

Nothing is perfect, but here are a few things I enjoy using: https://www.geogebra.org/calculator https://regex101.com/ https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ https://www.figma.com https://www.affinity.studio https://bluecinema.ch (To buy movie tickets for a certain movie chain in Switzerland. I haven't used this in many years, but at first glance it looks like I remember it. Back then, this was a very smooth experience both on desktop and mobile. Just perfectly done.) Any spreadsheet program (it's the spreadsheet itself, which I like, not necessarily how the UI is aranged around it) Apple's Spotlight, GNOME's similiar thing (don't know the name) I also like Tantacrul's interface design work: https://www.youtube.com/@Tantacrul/videos

For the all the necessary complexity and race-to-the-bottom features, I am a fan of Jetbrains. I like using Uber, Twitch (wrote a plugin for it one weekend to integrate with chrome), Netflix, Discord. There are plenty of companies that manage to be enjoyable to end users and expose apis without the inscrutable abstractions and terminology I encounter using google products. It feels the same as working with Oracle.

> Netflix Netflix? The barely functional video player accessed via excessively bloated thumbnail gallery? About the only good thing to say about this is that all the other movie streaming platforms somehow are even worse .

Its not hating - just stating the facts. Most companies unfortunately dont have a nice UX these days, because common UX practices like not making user think (i.e. overcomplicating the UIs) and not blocking users (showing annoying popups in the middle of UI workflows) somehow became a lost art. Some products are inherently easy to use like draw.io for example. I really like the UX on Stripe, in particular their onboarding process. There is also a semi-famous e-commerce company, in the furniture space. I forgot their name (something with W?), but I ordered something once, and was really impressed by how smooth and uncomplicated the process from browsing the inventory to checkout and delivery itself was.

None. A great UX nowadays is open source software running on your own hardware. For example, you couldn't pay me to use a "webmail" like GMail over my own IMAP server and Thunderbird.

As somebody who already does this, I wouldn't say the Thunderbird's UX is the real motivation. I do it for autonomy and avoiding lock-in, but Thunderbird has some frustrating inconsistencies particularly in its mishmash of searching and filtering.

why would a great UX be tied to the source being open or not?

Because if you don’t like the UX you just edit the source code yourself and make it better /s /s but I wish it wasn’t because a lot of FOSS evangelists have this mindset (here on HN too)

More seriously - open source software is resistant to enshittification. It's obviously not a panacea, but the possibility of forks (or just the user deciding not to update), combined with the difference in profit motive, tends to result in software that respects the user. (Taken holistically, the UX of software does not just mean the UI, or the moments when you are using the software. It also includes the stability of the software over time, including whether or not you are able to reject new versions whether you do not like.)

This. The only real risk with open source is that a (fairly niche) project is discontinued/abandoned, and you can't find binaries anymore for it anymore (and you don't have the skills to build it yourself). But this happens to proprietary software all the time (see killedbygoogle.com).

How's that? VLC, GIMP, Ubuntu search and settings. Terrible. Great products, awedul UX.

VLC is great I think.

Wow.. you are the one loving thunderbird. The ridiculous idea of removing menubar and if you enable that - it wastes valuable screenspace.

Omni Group. Wolfram. Parts of Apple. Rhino3D. Parts of Breville. Prusa (on device, not on desktop). Speed Queen (dial-based). Just from applications I currently have open and devices I can see from where I'm sitting.

I mean something that has a clear Google analog/equivalent that way can compare on. I personally think Wolfram Alpha (assuming that's what you're talking about) isn't any better than Google.

Never really used Alpha, was talking about Mathematica. I don’t the the web is compatible with good UX, but that doesn’t mean good UX isn’t possible — it just means that the companies that are successful at UX build native applications, or physical objects, or both.

I would say basically everything that has won a an Apple Design Award before 2020. Things for macOS for example.

No one's. Everyone sucks. Find a product and you'll find a population collating complaints about it. Whining about interface design is like the cheapest form of shared currency in our subculture. Fundamentally it's a bikeshed effect. Complaining about hard features like performance is likely to get you in trouble if you aren't actually doing the leg work to measure it and/or expert enough to shout down the people who show up to argue. But UI paradigms are inherently squishy and subjective, so you get to grouse without consequences.

I think the UX issues you’re describing are less related to culture changes in companies and more just in the industry in general UX are designed by and for people who don’t really use computers. They use mobile devices and tablets It’s an industry wide phenomenon

You are onto something there, if you mean, the design roles being taken over by the people who are not techies - like the POs. But if you just refer to UX being designed for mobile devices - that is not an excuse for an even worse UX on the mobile. If anything I would have expected more effort put in there, given how many more issues the limited screen estate can cause...

It’s designed for virtual keyboards rather than real ones That makes a bigger difference than screen space

> I wonder why Google UX always sucked so much It depends on how you define "suck." When Google first launched it's homepage, its emptiness (just a logo & search box) was a stark contrast to the portal pages popular, which were loaded with content. Some thought the Google homepage "sucked" whereas other liked it. (I was in the latter.) Likewise, the interface for Gmail. Or the interface for Google Maps. Or the interface for Chrome.

I remember when Google appeared and literally can't recall anyone who thought it sucked. There statistically have to be some people who hated it. But everyone I knew was either on dial-up or low bitrate leased line and it was impossible to dislike that design.

I remember it too! But not everyone was on dial-up. A lot were in dorms w/ (for the time) high speed connections or workplaces with it. Remember at the time it wasn't clear that search was going to be the dominate pattern for how people found information on the web. It seems crazy now, but in the early days of the web, the space was small enough that a directory-style approach worked pretty well. It was Yahoo's directory that made it initially popular, not its search. And so there was a fair bit of debate on which was better -- something like a directory + search (a la Yahoo!) vs just search. It took a bit of time before search proved if it was done really well, you didn't need a directory.

I'd like YouTube to add a button to stop showing scam ads from people outside my country.

Is there a big tech company that actually has good UX, besides maybe Apple?

I know Apple has a reputation for good UX but I think it's carry over from a different era and it's trending down. I bought my kid an iPad for Christmas and set up parental controls, then could not disable it without another iPad (which I don't have). There are many forum threads concluding you just have to factory reset. I couldn't believe how many little unintuitive things I bumped into setting it up.

> Every single one of their services is a pain to use Would you like to sign in to Google?

> very single one of their services is a pain to use Uhm, no? Google Cloud Platform is way more convenient to use than AWS, the IAM is way better designed, and documentation is leagues ahead of AWS.

> wonder why Google UX always sucked so much and in particularly in the recent years seem to be getting even worse UX? Google doesn't even bother helping folks locked out of their Gmail accounts. For people who use Android (some 3bn), that's like a digital death sentence, with real-world consequences. It is almost comical that anyone would think Google is customer-focused, but might if they were being paid handsomely to think otherwise, all the while drinking a lot of kool-aid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36024754 The top comment there is from a Xoogler which sums it up nicely: The thing is that at scale your edge cases are still millions of people. Companies love the benefits that come from scale, like having a billion people use their service, but they never seem to be capable of handling the other parts that come with it :( Google rakes in $100bn a quarter; that's $1bn every day.

That is a great point too. For a company which effectively does not have a customer service, how can they claim to be obsessing about helping users at all?

Hell, in my experience they often don’t even help ad customers that are having issues that prevent them from buying ads.

Google still suffers the most from not understanding those two. Probably more than other companies.

> Addy Osmani is a Software Engineer at Google working on Chrome and AI Thanks for all the spyware in Chrome ig? And for many inane design decisions that favor usability over privacy and security?

> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems. Complete bullshit. Sorry, but the reason why people use Google is because of the ecosystem + value proposition. Google Drive & Calendar are some of the most outdated pieces of SaaS software that only gets used because of the greater ecosystem they live in - and price. They (along with the other Google products) are also some of the poorest designed user interfaces online. Let's cut the crap for once here. If I were Google I would be worried because companies like Fastmail, Notion & Proton are quickly catching up.

the writing was already on the road w.r.t to user mindshare among normies. I see no evidence of the same happening with fast mail. why would anyone switch from gmail to fast mail other than privacy, which regular people couldn't care less about?

Privacy, as well as overall product experience. Btw, I didn't just mention Fastmail.

> 1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems. A little bit of sarcasm here: “well there probably isn’t a lot of great engineers at google then”