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Comment by virtyaluk | Hacker News Reader

I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!

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I think this is much less about Google developers not using their apps. My experience as a Googler is that people are actually quite good about working on apps they themselves use frequently. "Dogfooding" is a common term around the office.

What I think is going on here is:

* You have some app developers working on an app and caring about its particular user experience.

* Then you have framework UX designers/developers working on new design systems and rolling them out across hundreds of apps.

Those two have limited coordination with each other. So when a new design system like Material drops into every app, unconsidered interactions between the design system and the app's specific UI go sideways and no one is in a good position to notice or address it.

Google certainly takes the blame in this case, but I don't think it's a problem unique to Google either. There is always a tension between wanting a consistent user experience across many products and features and wanting a user experience that makes the most sense for one particular product or feature.

Yes, it's annoying that you can't get to stuff under the plus button. But users really do learn that "oh, the plus button will always be on the bottom right" and that provides real value to them for that to be consistently true across many apps. It makes each app easier to be productive in.

User experience design is hard and I don't think there's a silver bullet, though obviously this case is particularly annoying.

The silver bullet is caring.

There must be someone working on that app who notices those pain points.

"The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping."

Why is that?

Perhaps they're incentivised not to care. Perhaps the job is just a paycheque. Perhaps they mirror those around them.

Either way, the end result is the same. They don't care and their users suffer.

Caring is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The people who care must also be in positions to do something about it, which can be difficult in very large organizations that are also trying to make large coordinated systemic changes like moving to a new design system.

They can't even get their icons right last I checked. For some reason Apple and Google decided every icon has to be a uniform shape (which makes them all bland and harder to distinguish) but their own app icons are still custom shaped wrapped in squircles.

Yep. Google’s apps are the prime example of astonishingly bad UX and terribly nonsensical UI. What’s funnier is that they all somehow manage to feel like both a badly realised rip-off wannabe native iOS app all the while feeling like a complete alien to the entire system.

It’s just BIZARRE. Google apps and services are such a travesty; I detest that people have become so accustomed to them they’re basically the norm. Google sucks. Period.

In general, Google hates having customers at an institutional level.

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