>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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.