You must log in or register to comment.
This is not a well written arricle. They mixes up material design with corporate memphis, which is not necessarily related, they can exist independently.
Their actual problem with google’s ux appears only in this paragraph:
The problem? Google’s actual UI & UX design is terrible. Whether mass-market or enterprise, web or mobile, its interfaces are chaotic and confusing. Every time I use Google Drive or the G Suite admin console, I feel lost. Neither experience nor intuition helps—I feel like an old man seeing a computer for the first time. I used Android for years (stock Android on a Nexus device), yet even after all that time, I struggled to distinguish buttons from plain text.
No examples, no reasoning, no good counter examples how it should be done, nothing. I’m not super familiar with google’s web ux as I only use search and youtube ocasionally. They write here about android, but no android screenshots in the article. So is this about web ux only? Or anything google? The author couldn’t even figure out what is their problem, this article sounds like “old man yells at cloud”
Omg if Drive doesnt have an intuitive design they should never touch Sharepoint.
Okay this article is dog shit but Google Drive has absolutely awful search and is missing so many basic features even for things like finding out where a file is so I’m not defending Google there, the author makes a bad critique but it’s a thing worth critiquing.
Subjectively, material design in its newest iteration is just also ugly as sin too, android 8 - android 10 was peak android, get these fucking pastels and overly large buttons off my phone and bring back the white/blue simplicity of yesteryear gosh darn it.
Gmail on mobile is pretty horrendous as well.
Me: “Hey Google, can you pull up the emails with links to the concert tickets I purchased a few months back?”
Google: “Here is every correspondence you’ve had with the ticket seller smashed into a single email with only the latest one visible”
“But I purchased two tickets separately that came in different emails, how do I just get to those?”
“🤷♂️”
Email in general is hell. It’s meant to be individual letters but has now become the most unholy form of IM.
The simplest most ridiculous omission - Use the same signature as desktop for all mails.
As an old guy, this is the dumbest line. Google drive is easy as hell to use. Easier than the PCs I used in the 80’s, that’s for sure
Google Drive is tedious as hell to use. The UI is utter garbage. Yes, eventually you can get it to do what you want but it is absolutely painful, especially with its background operations that are not reflected in the UI (e.g. you delete something large, it blocks you from deleting the seemingly empty shared drive until that background operation is done but doesn’t tell you why in the UI).
I feel like all file-like UIs suck. I hate Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, Nautilus Google Drive, OneDrive (yes I’m talking about both local and native file UIs but I dislike them all). Are there any that you consider good? Because I’d like to try it.
Locally I usually just use the terminal/CLI (on Linux), much more flexible and you can use scripts or specialized tools (like rsync or fdupes) for operations you need to perform repeatedly. GUIs just tend to be too slow and repetitive for my taste.
On the other hand Google Drive is still a lot better than that monstrosity you need to battle if you want to actually create API keys for any Google product so for my limited needs I usually just deal with using it every month or two when I really need to.
you know, I honestly have never struggled even for a second with it. there’s lots of reasons not to use it, and I’m migrating away, but this is a very strange and quite frankly, super subjective, take. Two clicks to get to whatever I’m doing isn’t that much.
Two clicks to do what? I mean okay, if I just want to close the tab so I don’t have to look at it anymore that is maybe the one action I can perform in there within two clicks but what else can get done with just two clicks? First you need to navigate to the file which is painfully slow and inconsistent and then you need to select an operation from a usually nested context menu.
What? There’s so many limitations on how you can move and manage files! You can’t even copy directories! That was a basic command in the 80’s.
Sure it has a UI, which makes some things easier, but there were fewer limitations in the 80’s on what you could and couldn’t do.
yeah, I think I remember the 80s pretty well. Ran Wildcat boards before prodigy was a thing. Its nowhere near as tedious or limited as it was then.