> 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.

There was no beancounter takeover and it never was so obsessed. I worked there from 2006-2014 in engineering roles and found this statement was particularly jarring: "User obsession means spending time in support tickets, talking to users, watching users struggle, asking “why” until you hit bedrock"

When I worked on user facing stuff (Maps, Gmail, Accounts) I regularly read the public user support forums and ticket queues looking for complaints, sometimes I even took part in user threads to get more information. What I learned was:

• Almost nobody else in engineering did this.

• I was considered weird for doing it.

• It was viewed negatively by managers and promo committees.

• An engineer talking directly to users was considered especially weird and problematic.

• The products did always have serious bugs that had escaped QA and monitoring.

In theory there were staff paid to monitor these forums, but in practice the eng managers paid little attention to them - think "user voice" reports once a quarter, that sort of thing. Partly that's because they weren't technical and often struggled to work out whether a user complaint was just noise or due to a genuine bug in the product, something often obvious to an engineer, so stuff didn't get escalated properly.

This general disconnection from the outside world was pervasive. When I joined the abuse team in 2010 I was surprised to discover that despite it having existed for many years, only one engineer was bothering to read spammer forums where they talked to each other, and he was also brand new to the team. He gave me his logins and we quickly discovered spammers had found bugs in the accounts web servers they were using to blow past the antispam controls, without this being visible from any monitoring on our side. We learned many other useful things by doing this kind of "abuser research". But it was, again, very unusual. The team until that point had been dominated by ML-heads who just wanted to use it as a testing ground for model training.

> If the Google culture was at all obsessed about helping users

It's worth noting that Osmani worked as a "developer evangelist" (at Google) for as long as I can remember, not as a developer working on a product shipped to users.

It might be useful to keep that in mind as you read through what his lessons are, because they're surely shaped by the positions he held in the company.

> 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).

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 be fair, it reads precisely “1. The best engineers are obsessed with solving user problems”. This doesn’t say those engineers are working at Google, just that it’s something the author learned whilst they worked at Google.

“Some [of these lessons] would have saved me months of frustration”, to quote the preamble.

Addy's users have been developers and Google has been very responsive in the past. I was usually able to get a hold of someone from teams I needed from Chrome DevTools and they've assisted open source projects like Node.js where Google doesn't have a stake. He also has a blog, books and often attended conferences to speak to users directly when it aligned with his role. I agree about the general Google criticism but I believe it's unjustified in this particular (admittedly rare) case.

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?

I have an issue with the first point as well, but differently. Having worked on a user-facing product with millions of users, the challenge was not finding user problems, but finding frequent user problems. In a sufficiently complex product there are thousands of different issues that users encounter. But it's non-trivial to know what to prioritize.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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 can learn something at a company by observing it’s weaknesses as well as strengths

> 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 :(

> 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.

As a developer I took the writer's point to refer to "users" generically, so that even if you work on some internal tools or a backend layer, you still have users who have to use your app or consume your API and there is a lot of learning possible if you communicate and understand them better.

Probably the users he is talking about are not the end users like you and me. It is one team using the tools/software of the other team and so "users" for that other team are the members of the first team.

I see it differently then UX at all. I find the need for better customer support 1000x more pertinent to helping users.

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?

> Every single one of their services is a pain to use

Would you like to sign in to Google?

To me; point #3 is the big one and it is in conflict with point #1

> 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.

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