Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI
bookmarkos.com
bookmarkos.com
Not giving features for self-organization is a choice.
Google is just trying to help users realize that the web is a bad source for organized information. Google sells expensive clicks to personal injury lawyers off of titanic spam plantations of SEO content —- their mission is orthogonal to the organization of information.
Adding tags has a chance of causing user confusion, UI congestion and impact on existing tools (in the case of Google Drive) so it's not a free thing to do.
Based on the snippet linked, not exactly thst.
For example one of the thing the book says is users of earlier Windows versions used hierarchical structures.
To which I point out: the only alternative wasn't tags but a flat non-hierarchical lack of structure.
Another thing: The Gmail team got it kind of right, they introduced hierarchical tags.
Sometimes one solution is obviously better and you just need to get the knowlegde out.
Other times there are good reasons to keep both: I personally very much want to have both folders and tags.
At no point should one however take the modern ux trick: hide the power tool, use the fact that no one use it anymore as proof that no one wants it and then remove it.
Everything is a tag, why not right? They already have: everything is a list, everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a process. How much “everything is a” failures they need before realizing that these ideas were… obsessions I guess?
Tags are good for tagging, folders are good for hierarchical sorting, colors are good for emphasizing. What’s wrong with having all of them?
Exactly.
Since my bookmarks use proper tags I just update it once.
If I kept multiple copies in multiple folders I'd have to update multiple bookmarks in multiple folders.
The gulf between this and my own use of bookmarks is so, so vast.
I bookmark because I want to have something as a reference, or come back to it later (especially "bookmark all tabs").
I often think "Maybe I bookmarked this thing that I remember a few details of... hope those details are in the title, or that I happen to recognize the title!"
I often find that I've bookmarked the same site or page multiple times, because when I ran across it, I couldn't easily notice that I already had it saved.
I have 8000+ bookmarks.
https://pinboard.in/u:eitland/
I can mostly find anything I want within a few minutes. Oh, and I pay for archiving so there's a chance I can read it even if the link rots.
If not tags, then SOMETHING.
I do agree with the other comments that if there are some features which solves some real problems[1] even the majority users would use it.
Bookmarks can help solve some new age problems too, I recently found phished website of our Income Tax site as a top result in Google[2] and those using bookmark to visit such sites which we use once a year could have prevented from getting phished.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/57-i-forget-my-web-bookmarks-qu... (Disclaimer: I run this)
[2] https://twitter.com/heavyinfo/status/1409761416865746956
Edit: you can and should turn it off in settings: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/assist...
Man, I thought I was going nuts. For a pretty long time now I've just been dumbfounded when no or seemingly arbitrary street names are rendered (usually when I zoom in; when it counts). This happens for all sorts of streets, regardless of their significance. It's slightly insane this still occurs.
And this very aspect is what makes Google Maps not a proper map. It's optimized for point-to-point navigation, where you know the place you want to get to.
This wouldn't have been accidental, it would have been fully your own fault for negligence.
I'll fully admit this is a pedantic tangent but it's been long acknowledged that "accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash (for instance, using an app to navigate instead of being better acquainted with your route ahead of time):
https://laist.com/news/car-crash-accident-traffic-violence-l...
Agree that using phones while driving is generally bad, but implying that it is irresponsible to use turn-by-turn (and suggesting the alternative of just knowing where you are) is just more likely to make people ignore the problem all together.
It isn't irresponsible to use turn-by-turn navigation (and I don't think GP is implying that). It's irresponsible to fiddle with the phone you are using for that purpose while driving.
They wrote:
"...intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash (for instance, using an app to navigate..."
They straight out stated that using navigation predictably leads to crashes and must be regarded as intentional.
So I don't see any way to avoid the conclusion that they think navigation is ethically and practically the same as DUI/DWI.
Don’t distract from the point.
I do take the blame.
I'm driving somewhere 6 hours away that I've never been with a dog in the car. Normally it's quite safe for me to do things like manage turn by turn navigation, and pick up a hands free call, or pause an audiobook, or ask the phone to reroute me to food, gas, or a rest stop.
If you are able to drive solo 6 hours to a new place in total silence without stopping for food, rest, or gas, or touching the turn by turn navigations to make an update, I'll fly you out to me and pay you $1000 a day to teach me how.
I am also able to manage those things without taking my eyes off the road for more than I would looking at my speedometer. If there's a new UI that's new and different, you should have pulled over to figure it out instead of almost crashing not once, but twice.
> I am also able to manage those things without taking my eyes off the road for more than I would looking at my speedometer.
Yea so that would be normal operating procedure for me as well! Definitely I should have pulled over when the severity of the UI change became clear to me, but it was already too late and I was slamming the brakes. I was in the far left lane in bumper to bumper traffic and it wasn't quite as simple as you think it must have been. Can you understand my frustration at needing to do that? I made the wrong choice and I didn't do that. Can you still understand my frustration with the situation?
Since you are so concerned about automobile safety, do you have any suggestion on how to get a taxi/Uber/Lyft/etc driver who keeps at least one hand firmly grasping the steering wheel at all times the car is in motion?
I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days.
Certainly the way laws are written, there is quite a high bar before an "accident" brings the kinds of criminal charges that any other reason for a similar action would trigger. For example, if you kill someone through inattention, that is often charged as involuntary manslaughter, unless you did it with a car and were following traffic laws, in which case it is rarely charged.
As a society we have traditionally come to accept that driving kills lots of people, often but not always at random, and we don't want to be handing out random prison sentences for those with merely bad luck. (Or, at least, without provable blame.)
I suspect there will be backlash, your post is one example.
The link I shared previously (Fonseca, 2020) mentions this:
---
Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident.
You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions.
In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars.
So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation.
In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken."
Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today.
The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.
I'd rather not be responsible for any accident related to google maps, because ultimately, it'd be my fault, and I'd not feel relieved just because google changed its layout.
This is not about excusing the bad pattern of modernizing UI just for the sake of it, just about not relieving myself out of responsibility.
I agree with you, but that ain't a great word either.
I'd like to have a word that also includes did-not-cause-accident-by-luck failures, such as running a red light or failing to notice a bicyclist who slammed brakes to avoid you sideswiping them.
Best I can offer is "incident".
I agree that I as the driver would have been at fault in an accident. Car accident is a really common thing to call it even when the person naming the incident is 100% at fault and knows it. I would have been 100% at fault and I know that.
Still, it's hard not to get frustrated when previously safe activities become unsafe because of a UI update that was ostensibly made to increase safety.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E&ab_channel=Dames...
I get emails from ServiceNow with zero details about the original ticket, I get shell packaging that makes me want to use power tools to open it, I get user interfaces so overran with calls to action that you can't find what you are looking for, no way to use your voice to correct a text while driving, i cant mute audio while the car is in reverse, and the price scanners at my local safe way are so finicky and track that everything is sitting on a scale and any mess up at all and now you need manual intervention as opposed to the self checkout at Walmart where you can just kinda wave your product near the scanner and it finds it and it doesn't yell at you when you put bags in your cart to make room for other purchases, and the list goes on.
Where's the fucking "Report a user interface problem" window???
Probably these things got put in a future release, or are in the backlog still. Well meaning product designers wanted them and can't have them or some other typical big-co reason a product gets little iteration.
It took them years and years to finally make the "Ignore Toll Roads" on Google maps not reset after you close the app, even after tons of bug reports with hundreds of responses.
It's no Excel, especially for bigger sheets or complex functions, but it's been a good way to provide my website users with a web spreadsheet. I'm reminded this every 4 years when I need to install Excel.
Working with dozens of people through Docs and Sheets, I love their evergreen-ness. Sure, I wish there were more features but it's amazing to keep software simple, especially when it is used so widely.
That they DGAF if they're not facing competition.
IE6 was the same.
Threaten them with loss of market share and they'll fix these things.
I would guess it has to do with what I have heard is the promotion path at Google. It seems you need to ship, and ship new things, if you want to be a serious contender. That leaves few engineers willing to take a look at Google Sheets issues and put together a PR to fix these things.
I wouldnt put google sheets in the same category. I think it has been improved over the years (perhaps not as much as it should have).
Honestly from my experience, people just don’t care. Devs will just say it’s by design and it’s the users’ fault, product owners don’t use the product so much as develop it, and everyone else is just detached from what they’re making. In the end, no one really owns the product.
Or, you know, they happen to have a pretty good
search solution and don't want to spend time
and risk building something else
Google’s core business is still search. By
neglecting UI and design for these products,
Google corals user behavior into a “search-first”
mentality. The more disorganized you become, the
more reliant you become on search, and Google
benefits.
So, no need for Google to prefer a search-based approach. In fact, I will gladly give up all my organization tools for better search, and that's why I am happy with Google's way. I actually dislike most of their UI decisions, like I hate most of the modern web/electon app design, not just Google's. But search-over-organization, love it.
I wouldn't call it a dark pattern, just not a pattern suitable for the author. I would like to say, go find something else, Google is about search and has always been, but unfortunately, the options are limited. Maybe because Google is so successful, most of the other big names go search-first, but do it poorly. They don't search as well as Google, and don't have good organization tools.
I’ve never organized my photos anymore thanks to Google Photos amazing search, no more time wasted organizing windows media player albums like in the old times thanks to Spotify, I never organize my notes on Notes app but can always find old stuff, my Google Drive is a bit more organized but still I basically go by recent items or search all the time
I think we are just so overwhelmed with information nowadays it’s impossible to keep organizing it, why not let machines just find what we want?
Now I do agree that browsers search on bookmarks sucks, and I like a lot to bookmark everything so I can find it later, building my own personal index, to solve that I built an extension that crawls my bookmarks and allows me to search better on them later (it’s called Cataloger if you are interested)
we are just so overwhelmed with information nowadays it’s impossible to keep organizing it, why not let machines just find what we want whenever we need them
Then you don’t need bookmarks. You bookmark for a reason, and one of these is that you may not remember exact wording and use other cues like when you did it, what was around, how it looked like on a thumbnail.
I basically add tags when bookmarking and categorize distinct 'tastes' by adding typed keywords into the bookmark text.
Though that's an argument that standard search alone isn't enough.
that’s exactly the reason to have a good search, I usually always remember a word or at least the general idea of what the thing I’m trying to find was about, a good enough search like Google understand meaning, even if I don’t use the exact words
> please tell how am I supposed to search for bookmarks I made in japanese section of xvideos?
I don’t know, how does xvideos or YouTube does it? You do the same, but with a very limited corpus of just your bookmarks it will be way easier
Regarding history: Drive had tags early on and a lack of hierarchical folder categorization (think of "files sorted like email messages" instead of "files sorted in a hierarchy"). Users pushed back with a very clear demand for folders, so Google implemented them (at which point, tags are redundant). 100% of the functionality of tags exists via folders and the ability to use Shortcuts (select a doc in Drive and shift-Z) to assign a file to multiple folders.
Regarding current application: Drive syncs to filesystems of major OSes and is therefore constrained somewhat in supporting features that are maintainable across multiple OS filesystem abstractions. I don't doubt Google could find a way to implement the wishlist the author describes, but the value / cost ratio is questionable.
Author's claim of lack of support for folder colors is also just false. I agree that his full laundry-list isn't present, but folder colors are accessible by right-clicking on a folder in the Drive UI and selecting "Change color".
All of that having been said, the author's own app seems to be well-positioned to address those wants so I'm not sure why they are making wild guesses at Google's intentions instead of just taking advantage of the big, lumbering megacorp being big and lumbering and back-filling those features for users.
I have tried OpenStreetMaps (albeit 5+years ago) and couldn't search for an address. So if that's improved I'd like to know.
I don't need/want "find X near me" or fluff like "what restaurant's are open right now?".
All I want is navigation between current location and target address.
There is also a lot of clutter.
These are traits that have all gotten worse over the years. I'd prefer the UI of the first-gen Google Maps then what we have today.
I have no complaints about the actual navigation, there has been quirks over the years but nothing that stands out in my mind.
As far as I know, it doesn't do pathfinding either. A client will have to take the data from OSM and use its own algorithms to navigate.
It is offline - meaning you download the areas you are interested in first, after which all the data is available fully offline (including stuff like directions, metro maps etc). The interface takes a bit to get used to, but the biggest let down is the fact that you can't edit a route in the route planner - you need to start all over again (selecting start/destination, no way to modify either).
[0] - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/ (also available on Play Store)
To search for a note you have to press the search box twice. First time you just get types of things - if you want to search free text you have to press again.
I'd argue that UI encourages using tags over search.
It's honestly my only major annoyance about Google Keep.
Me: I want a coffee shop.
Maps: Ok let me zoom out and show you coffee shops in a 20km radius.
So you have to zoom back in and “Search this area”. But hey the Starbucks next door is not shown, it’s maddening.
Google’s core business is now ads, not search.
It has been for over 20 years now, since October 2000.
>It's honestly my only major annoyance about Google Keep.
I definitely have more annoyances - it can be slow, it has only minimum features, you can't change the ordering etc.
That's probably why it doesn't suck as badly as most other Google products.
> you can't change the ordering etc.
Of notes? Of checkbox items? In both cases: you most definitely can. I just did that, both in the browser and in the app.
You can reorder them one by one but there's no option to then re-order by last edited or created or ascending or anything. Is there?
Similarly, when I switched from Google Maps to Apple Maps, the favorites UI was enough better that I started using it more and relying on search less.
There’s definitely a pattern of Google underperforming in ways that make you fall back on Google Search, sending Google data, and viewing Google ads.
I considered polishing it for publication, but I think that what made it so good for me is I made it specific to my needs. Besides, I’m off Chrome now, and they fixed the bug I was using to steal focus from the URL bar to make shortcuts work.
It optionally worked in combination with a browser plugin that did a tree view that showed a true navigation history (one site could have many children). So you could find the site and the context and the time you saw it and trace back the multi-path journey you took.
I have no idea where the code is. Probably some old cvs repo somewhere.
Wouldn't be of much use now since everything is https. Back then my inability to log https was the "method" to make sure that I didn't log anything sensitive such as banking details because only that stuff was in https at the time.
Apple's primary business model is not search, so there could be some evidence that more people just prefer search over tags/folders/icons etc.
Same for Finder's search, defaults to searching weird folders and bad at reducing the noise.
We have to become compulsive hoarders, to train a bot that will help us find things, we could put in the right place in the first place.
Does anyone have an idea about the userbase of Bookmarks? Maybe it's actually reallllllly low and this isn't worth anyone but power users' time.
Drive search, bookmark search, and Web search are totally different features in totally different products. Notably, the first two have no ads, so driving you to search in this case has no clear positive effect for Google.