Comment by kamjam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamjam | Hacker News Reader

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I said it before and I got downvoted to hell, but I'll say it again. Just because those of those of us on HN can deal with these UI changes does not mean that the vast majority of the public can. We ARE the minority, and when designing systems we should expect people to be computer illiterate. I am the computer-go-to-guy whenever something goes wrong or family members/friends need help, and ANY UI change always leads to difficulty. Something as small has the UI change from IE7-8-9 was enough to trigger a "how do I use this thing?" every single time. Same when MS Office introduced the ribbon.

It's the reason Apple have done so well - they didn't invent anything new which hadn't already been done, they just added better UI that appealed to the masses.

I have to say, I agree with most of what is written in that blog, I've gotten used to some of the changes now but still a lot of the time keep looking around to see where the hell something has gone (the attach files expands out to reveal more options, why the hell is add URL link under attach options?)

Ah... but neither Google nor Apple care much about customer feedback on their UI's. Google will have an abandoned forum thread you can complain about defects on that will never be read. Apple will simply delete the forum thread to keep everything starchy. Either way users either find a way around the problem, stop using technology, or cling to their Outlook 1998 client.

Actually, we care deeply about customer feedback and several of us on the product team read the threads on the product forums personally, especially when there is vocal feedback. We don't necessarily act on everything, of course. With a product that operates at global scale we have a huge responsibility to make sure we are making optimizations that improve Gmail for as many users as possible, and the only way to do that is to rely on metrics and surveys that capture the entire user base. Otherwise we would be, by definition, changing a UI used by hundreds of millions in response to a vocal, non-representative minority. Basically we use the product forums and social media to figure out of there are trends or issues that we should be concerned about, but then always validate those issues with real data before taking action.

Thanks for the reply Jason. Many of the movements of the Google properties have been toward the light over the last two years and it certainly is a very difficult task for the Google peeps. Props to them.

Alas, as a keen WebApp dev myself, I have found myself having to Google for how to do tasks I once did easily. Such searches eventually uncover the highly counter intuitive means to do the previously simple thing (via someone's blog post), or reveal that the feature has been dropped from the new and improved version. Such issues are not a subjective matter of color choice or icon design, but the reduction of functionality and confounding of user interaction.

Largely Google wins the efforts to improve their products, but I've seen a half dozen such failings in the last year that I am surprised managed to ship. Hopefully their batting average continues to improve.

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