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Google websites are my least favorite to have to interact with by a long shot. I often struggle to find where they have hidden the basic common things I need to

Google websites are my least favorite to have to interact with by a long shot. I often struggle to find where they have hidden the basic common things I need to do. It’s like the people who design their sites are not the people that use them. There are no other sites I find as frustrating to navigate, except perhaps zooms website/user admin console.

bitpush 1y ago
Big claims but no examples. What are some complex apps that are seamless and easy? There's a reason why a cockpit of Airbus 380 looks intimidating. Some of the complex stuff looks complex.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  The pilot of the Airbus 380 is highly trained and has a set of checklists for everything they might have to do with that thing. Google products don't intimidate me with a large number of features, rather they annoy me by hiding the features I use all the time while shoving things in my face I could care less about, expecting me to do things in the opposite order of how I expect to use them, etc. Search for "Google transit" and you don't find an entrance to Google maps optimized for transit users, instead you find a landing page that is probably of interest to 1% of the people who are searching for that https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/ I wanna say that it is "enterprisey" in that it is certainly oriented to about 50,000 enterprises worldwide but it's got the same visual veneer of simplicity that Google likes which doesn't come across as "enterprisey"
  - bitpush 1y ago
    Someone mentioned Google cloud console (or AWS console) looks crazy and intimidating. Perhaps to a novice. But for experienced folks it is pretty ok.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      In my mind the complexity of the AWS console is the complexity of what it controls. The patterns used in it are very standard and boring patterns for enterprise applications and if they tasked me to make an interface for that system I'd make one that looks almost exactly like it because... that's how you do it. What gets me are applications for "creative" people. I was in this hackathon [1] https://prod.cis.cornell.edu/dgas-first-game-jam-gives-game-developers-chance-level https://prod.cis.cornell.edu/dgas-first-game-jam-gives-game-... where I used Unity for the first time and thought it was nuts, the same way I'd think Photoshop was nuts if I wasn't used to it. [1] we won! had a guy who was good at making platformers in Unity and a gal who was a good artist. I was just the startup veteran who knows the meaning of "minimum" and "viable" and how to find the intersection
- 3np 1y ago
  One thing that really gets me is making text elements and links (or are they buttons?) non-selectable in various places. I routinely have to open devtools and inspect-element to get at some link in gcal or address in gmaps I want to copy but not open in current browser context. Figuring out how to extract the GPS coordinates for a location (without having to deconstruct the URL or delve into devtools) after the latest UI rearrangement in gmaps has been turning into a regular a scavenger hunt... This isn't complex stuff. With some regressions it's hard to tell what's negligence and what's actively user-hostile. My Occam's Razor is growing duller by the quarter.
remram 1y ago
It's in the side menu. No, the third one. Or maybe the hamburger? Or possibly you have to click on your own picture, who knows.

bitpush 1y ago

Big claims but no examples. What are some complex apps that are seamless and easy? There's a reason why a cockpit of Airbus 380 looks intimidating. Some of the complex stuff looks complex.

PaulHoule 1y ago
The pilot of the Airbus 380 is highly trained and has a set of checklists for everything they might have to do with that thing. Google products don't intimidate me with a large number of features, rather they annoy me by hiding the features I use all the time while shoving things in my face I could care less about, expecting me to do things in the opposite order of how I expect to use them, etc. Search for "Google transit" and you don't find an entrance to Google maps optimized for transit users, instead you find a landing page that is probably of interest to 1% of the people who are searching for that https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/ I wanna say that it is "enterprisey" in that it is certainly oriented to about 50,000 enterprises worldwide but it's got the same visual veneer of simplicity that Google likes which doesn't come across as "enterprisey"
- bitpush 1y ago
  Someone mentioned Google cloud console (or AWS console) looks crazy and intimidating. Perhaps to a novice. But for experienced folks it is pretty ok.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    In my mind the complexity of the AWS console is the complexity of what it controls. The patterns used in it are very standard and boring patterns for enterprise applications and if they tasked me to make an interface for that system I'd make one that looks almost exactly like it because... that's how you do it. What gets me are applications for "creative" people. I was in this hackathon [1] https://prod.cis.cornell.edu/dgas-first-game-jam-gives-game-developers-chance-level https://prod.cis.cornell.edu/dgas-first-game-jam-gives-game-... where I used Unity for the first time and thought it was nuts, the same way I'd think Photoshop was nuts if I wasn't used to it. [1] we won! had a guy who was good at making platformers in Unity and a gal who was a good artist. I was just the startup veteran who knows the meaning of "minimum" and "viable" and how to find the intersection
3np 1y ago
One thing that really gets me is making text elements and links (or are they buttons?) non-selectable in various places. I routinely have to open devtools and inspect-element to get at some link in gcal or address in gmaps I want to copy but not open in current browser context. Figuring out how to extract the GPS coordinates for a location (without having to deconstruct the URL or delve into devtools) after the latest UI rearrangement in gmaps has been turning into a regular a scavenger hunt... This isn't complex stuff. With some regressions it's hard to tell what's negligence and what's actively user-hostile. My Occam's Razor is growing duller by the quarter.

remram 1y ago

It's in the side menu. No, the third one. Or maybe the hamburger? Or possibly you have to click on your own picture, who knows.