As a former Googler, Google has been utterly hostile to self critcism on this front. Responses to any criticism of Google's UI falls in the following buckets:
- Well I think it looks great.
- Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means)
- We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good.
Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.
The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."
> Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.
Not at Google, but what I saw was worse than that. It was "we need more data" over and over and, on each round, I could watch other people's riskier changes just fly by without a shred of evidence that they even did what they were claimed to (let alone that they were beneficial). "Need more data" is not always just inertia. It's often a way of defending territory or enforcing hierarchy. Being "data driven" only really works when it's done consistently, and abuses called out.
The problem with data driven is how do you get data without actually doing it. Sometimes you can prototype, but if they won't let you do anything you are stuck.
Then there is measurement. Even if you can prototype, you might be forced to collect the wrong data.
I think sometimes "need more data" has a similar connotation as "citation needed". It's a way to dismiss an idea you don't believe in without being fully dismissive. In other words, it can be a way of saying "I don't think it's obvious that your idea will float, but I'm willing to accept it if you can provide evidence for it".
Of course there's a risk for bias here, you'll be more inclined to trust a close team mate than someone with just as good arguments outside your team which can lead to unlucky territorial behavior, even when intentions are good. But at least it leaves an opening for challenge that "nah, I think it won't work and I own the code, sorry" does not.
Uggghh, this is a pet peeve of mine. Particularly when dealing with people that are not domain experts. Like why do I even exist, if not to provide a good data point for what the product you're developing for me should look like?
I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.
It's amazing to me that something as innocuous as, "Professional conduct includes at least an attempt at constructive criticism as opposed to venting" is now a heretical concept on this website.
Derision makes an unmistakable point. Is nothing worthy of derision? I say nothing rather than no one, because to deride a product's failings is not the same as belittling a person.
Let me add that Google has outsize power and influence, and the idea that we need to be nice to the corporate juggernaut is completely ridiculous.
We're not talking about 3rd party opinions here, we're talking about colleagues at the same institution being aggressive and destructive with professional designers.
Eye strain and inscrutable UI elements sound like concrete complaints. Whether they were phrased diplomatically, I'm not sure, and I'd concede it might be construed as venting depending on the delivery.
That being said, assuming it was brought up constructively, I see nothing wrong with the criticism except for the specific designers' refusal to consider it.
It would be great if it was brought up constructively. However, this thread appears to be about mocking the concept of psychological safety in the workplace.
I personally can't really see any evidence of mocking or any psychologically-unsafe ideas in any of the comments in this thread, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. You can criticize a product (design) without disparaging the person who created it, and I hope we all can take constructive criticism without making it personal.
Good UI design shouldn't be strictly for design's sake, so it can be frustrating when something is difficult to use because 'looking good' was prioritized over usability.
There's a quote I've read here that I like and think is appropriate: "Accessibility is for everybody."
Really, so this quote by ewmiller that I responded to:
> I wonder how long my employment would last if I just stopped doing a good job and then said that as a response to any effort by my manager or teammates to criticize my output.
was not a direct attack on the notion that professional conduct should include some degree of psychological safety?
Or perhaps this post [0] that says:
> In regular companies, employees who are bad at their jobs shouldn't feel safe, as they are likely to be fired.
I'm a Google SRE. I'm not actually a big fan of the Gmail interface either (and it'd be better if they actually followed material design, imo).
But this spirit is fundamentally opposed to people in corporate environments doing good work. Blameless portmortems exist for a reason. Because otherwise, every systemic or personal failure devolves into a scapegoating competition designed to find and remove the most vulnerable member of the team. My criticism is directed specifically at folks suggesting that internally peers at my workplace should harass designers.
I feel like there isn't even an option to give feedback to Google.
I was trying to join a Google Meet (or is it Hangouts? or is it Hangouts Meet? Or is it Gmail meet?) event this morning. It somehow dialed out of my Gmail app (WTF?) instead of the Meet app, said it was "joining as" my personal account and I had no option to switch it to my work account, and I wasn't able to look at my e-mail during the meeting because the Gmail app was busy dealing with a call.
I don't even know where to begin about how awful of a UX this has become. I'd give them feedback but there isn't even an obvious option to do that.
Also, I truly hate the new UIs from Google where buttons jump around. The order of "Maps", "Images" tabs in search results jumps around depending on the search and that messes with my muscle memory. Buttons just randomly disappear and appear as you scroll up and down. Names of streets and restaurants randomly disappear in navigation mode. Some buttons get bigger and smaller as you scroll. What was the product manager smoking when they called for this BS? As a user I constantly feel like I can never use my phone, and I have no way to even relay this to them. Did they even care to A/B test this stuff and analyze how many times users were e.g. hitting the back button (or other metrics of user fumbling)?
I get the impression they don’t care if you enjoy using it, just that you are using it so they can continue to capture the data. They know most people aren’t going anywhere.
Well, if engagement is measured by time in the system, then a bad UI/UX can help that measure. If things move around inside an app frequently enough, I'm forced to spend more time using it because I on longer know how (Google Finance changed yet again a few weeks ago on me). If they hold an outsized share of the market + momentum from people having used their services for (now) 20+ years, then they can get away with this for a while.
This sounds cynical, but I wonder if this is actually the case to some extent. If you only look at engagement metrics, then those engagement metrics will be optimised, no matter how. Cobra effect and all that.
There’s an amusing issue with Google Opinion Rewards where it only supports payouts to PayPal (of all things), it doesn’t let you enter a PayPal account, instead it just assumes your Google account is your PayPal account and sends money there.
This means I can’t use it because PayPal somehow let someone else add my email to their account years ago and won’t unlink it.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins"
When Material Design was first launched to the public, I was astonished of just how bad some of it was – and how Google, with all its experts and resources, had managed to ignore so much basic HCI.
I wasn't able to recognize and distinguish different types of widgets from one another, and the design language broke with established principles. It wasn't evident how to interact with an element on the screen based on its visual qualities.
I assumed for weeks that the original Material Design launch video was parody. I'm a Brit, and sometimes American comedy just doesn't click with me.
I can still remember the feeling of surprise, followed by something more like horror, as I realised they were actually being serious, and that with their weight behind it, this mess of glaring flaws that numerous critics had picked up on from day one was likely to dominate a lot of UI work for the next several years. And sure enough, many of those flaws are still there today, hardly changed.
It’s been shocking to me how much Material Design has been worshipped in the design community and nobody has dared to pick out even the basic flaws in the design system, not even asking to go as far as saying that plain ‘boxes’ do not represent any ‘material’ and drop shadows are outdated.
Here's a 2019 Google blog post about Google's user studies to redesign their Material Design text field. They ran three separate studies testing over 140 combinations of 7 text field characteristics with 600 participants. The end result is better but they basically just discovered that users couldn't identify text fields that had only subtle visual affordances (like a light gray underline instead of a black rectangle). The exercise reminded me of the Google designer story about testing "63 shades of blue links".
Agree. When I commented how Material Design was so bad when it came out, many got offended. So I thought it must be a subjective personal thing. Now it's relief knowing I'm not the only one who think it's bad and full of UX anti-patterns. Flat design should be a thing of the past. It's unintutive e.g. hyperlink and button can be indistinguishable, no clear navigation UI. If any company should lead industry with a design framework, it should be Apple.
I had to adjust the contrast on my monitors to see the boundaries of Google+ posts and UI elements, because light gray on lighter gray has been Google's favorite UI pattern for ages...
Had a similar experience, “data” is used where it seems useful to explain an already made decision. Criticism is hostile and un-googley when it doesn’t fit the narrative. At the end of the day for the sake of the promo it’s not worth arguing.
A company or individual who strives for excellence absolutely loves criticism as long as its constructive and not a personal attack. Criticism is great as it allows mistakes and issues get resolved. I feel like the statement:
>how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work
is absurd. No wonder google lags behind a large majority of tech companies in their design approach and UI. One of the reasons why Apple has skyrocketed past google in market cap(2.01T vs 1.19T) is they put the user first, make beautiful designs that are functional and hold their value well and have excellent customer service. Google has always held customer service and help as "beneath them", its in their DNA and I don't see that ever changing.
What I've always found odd is the lack of options across Google applications. It's one thing to play it safe, but another to deny basic modifications that are usually standard. Things as simple as changing color options are so often absent.
I think it's worth noting, just because it's kinda crazy: Gmail's desktop UI has and continues to support themes, including dark ones, for like... over a decade. It managed to survive all of their redesigns, while none of their apps had any dark modes at all.
Cheers to the one dude somewhere inside the labyrinth who managed to fight for that feature all these years...
It means they worry about losing their job when they're criticized. Like most things, it was supposed to mean actual physical danger, or at least real mental danger, but now it just means anything that threatens them in some way.
It's ironic, because that feedback could help make them better at their jobs and keep them from being fired. Instead, they force a situation where their termination is completely out of their control.
I wonder if this is an American phenomena and might be different in a place with a stronger social safety net?
Frankly, losing your job IS an actual physical danger and a real mental danger. No income, no insurance, have to play the interview game again... Time running out, savings getting gutted (too bad COBRA costs are so high). If you can't find work, well homelessness is a very real possibility (there goes years or decades of equity). There isn't a 'limit' to how far we let people fall, and that's a shame.
I would absolutely expect people in this environment to fight tooth-and-nail for their jobs, and that might result in this kind of resistance to suggestions. Gotta keep yourself and family healthy first and foremost.
One way is to reject all criticism and attack anyone who dares to try, hopefully preventing future criticism so that maybe, just maybe, your boss won't notice your incompetence.
Another is to accept the criticism, get better, and then not have to worry about your job because you do it well.
If someone isn't capable of actually doing their job, they can't really pick the second choice. In that case, it's in everyone else's best interest to expose the situation and stabilize the company, saving their own jobs.
Perhaps the designers in question are not understanding how much people dislike their work? Sounds like a difficult conversation needs to be had about accepting feedback, and making customers happy.
> Any legitimate criticism of someone's work turns into a personal attack, or worse, "bullying". This is not a reasonable position to take, and will come back to bite liberal people, either in work, government, or policy.
You are erroneously conflating liberal ideology (the western world except the USA) and sensitivity. In nordic countries, people are significantly less sensitive, and more liberal for example.
> this is a byproduct of too-sensitive people allowing feelings to become what you get judged by
You know, a word of advice - I've never heard someone who calls others "sensitive" or "snowflakes" also be capable of a good faith argument about the offensiveness / professionalism / etc of a topic.
This right here is the issue. Something like this happening is so unthinkable because you, presumably a good levelheaded kind coworker, can't even fathom why anyone would do this and you've been lucky enough to not have experienced it first hand. And because of your priors the only logical conclusion is that the victim must be lying or overreacting or too sensitive. It's a frustrating situation because at it's core it's totally logical but to me and others like me who've experienced these kinds of threats first-hand it's not outlandish and an uphill battle to get people to believe that this stuff really happens.
Now to be fair I'm not totally free of bias because I can't fathom why anyone would lie about something so serious and have experienced first hand the struggle of getting higher-ups to take you seriously.
Could you expand on: "Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work?" Your quote seems a little bit like a disingenuous paraphrasing of real issues, but I try not to dismiss things just because they're surprising to my world view.
I would be interested in seeing what kind of feedback (internal? external?) prompted this sort of response.
The translation of that is: "We're Google and we have literally billions of users, therefore we can't be wrong. Shut the fuck up and go back to your cubicle. Your opinion doesn't matter because I have more seniority than you, even though I work in an industry that largely tosses aside such ridiculous convention and had historically lauded and elevated risk takers and rule breakers."
In other words, Google has become thoroughly bureaucratic, which means it will inevitably stagnate and die... it'll just be a very slow death.
If you're a SWE and you say you don't like the new redesign of X for reasons Y and Z, you will be told various things, including "Do you have an art degree? Didn't think so", and "These are your coworkers. You need to be respectful of their hard work" no matter how respectfully you phrase your critique.
- Well I think it looks great.
- Stay in your lane, how dare you criticize our designers. This makes them feel unsafe at work. (Whatever the fuck that means)
- We did a user study and they liked it, so it must be good.
Fundamentally, Googlers are afraid to make real judgement calls. You're accountable to those. So you hide behind endless user studies, committees, etc. This doesn't just apply to designers: Engineers are also sandbagged with "we need more data" until a risk-taking idea gets snuffed out of existence.
The internal "inspirations" doc for Material cite the original Google.com search UI. A big white screen with a text box in the middle.
If you ever wonder "why the fuck can't I tell where one piece of the UI ends and the other begins" or "why do I have terrible eye strain from this UI" when looking at a Google property, it's because designers are boxed in by that "inspiration."