Every time I've had to log into something through google for like the last month or so there's been this weird banner threatening that google is preparing to make their login page worse. It's so funny. I wonder if they've got a KPI for how much dread they fill their users with.
@aeva this isn't the first time I've seen Google do this and I'm wondering what happens is
Google receives many pieces of user feedback saying "You changed this thing and I like it less now"
Google realizes this is a problem, but refuses to accept the problem is either "change is disruptive to users; we should change less often" or "our design sense is worse than it was before; we are making bad changes"
Google concludes the problem is people are surprised by changes
@aeva The potentially horrible step 4 is "Google receives just as many pieces of negative feedback about the change as before, but now some PM is able to check a box saying 'negative feedback about changes addressed' because the internal incentives are to submit a plan for addressing negative feedback, not for the feedback itself to be positive or negative"
@mcc this makes me wonder how many of google's minions are completely high on the design team's supply, vs how many know the design team isn't wearing any clothes and just kinda go with it.
@aeva@mcc When I worked there it seemed like the place was full of random engineers yelling about how various changes to various user experiences were bad ideas, and for all their internal docs and G+ posts they had maybe even less of an impact than Vonnegut's famous custard pie dropped from a stepladder.
@klara@aeva When Google's designs first started going bad, I could not help but notice that Google had blog posts actively bragging that they'd hired X famous external design firm to do their redesign.
I don't know if they're still getting totally external people to do their designs, but it wouldn't surprise me if there continues to be a hard division between the people who use and are familiar with the project and the people who are making the set-in-stone designs.
@mcc@aeva I'm thinking it might be even more boring, like a standing order to announce design changes N months before they go live so people don't think they're being phished or similar
@mcc@rygorous I feel like that just sets us up for a fishing login page with a new design and a banner that says "we've finally changed how our login page looks!" and the only tell is the new design actually looks nice
@aeva@mcc To me the actual odd part is saying "we're changing our login" but not showing what the new design will look like because... they don't want to spoil the grand reveal I guess?
I mean, it's gonna be a login page. It's gonna have two text boxes, a submit button and an "I forgot my password" link. You know, login page stuff.
If you don't want people to be surprised, just spoil the surprise. It's fine.
@aeva@mcc Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from my personal experience but the best-case outcome for a UI redesign for me is an initial "eh, it's fine" and then a few weeks later as I've figured out changed workflows I might actually think "yeah this is better". That's the best case.
More often, a niche feature I use regularly gets removed or broken with no clear replacement and everything gets moved around so it's worse for me now and takes me a long while to climb back to "OK I guess" as I adapt.
@rygorous@aeva It's possible I stay mad longer than other people. I'm still annoyed about Google design changes that happened well over a decade ago. I stayed mad about a particular GMail redesign so long that they went through two further redesigns and eventually random-walked to a design basically similar to the original design, before I stopped being mad.
I suspect I will stay mad about this particular bit of UI on the mastodon.social interface longer than I continue using mastodon.social
@mcc@aeva For me, layout/organizational stuff is low emotional investment (as noted), but if you're laggy, screw up relative input event ordering, keep stealing input focus/hiding things I'm currently trying to interact with or similar, that's an instant 8/10 "this is personal now and you made an enemy today"
@mcc@aeva I really really want to be able to operate things from muscle memory without having to stop, wait and think after every step and if you screw that up, I'm mad
@konahart I suppose they could add a permanent banner to remind users that they live in a hell that they are powerless to change. Then google could just wing it with the UI redesigns whenever they're in the mood.
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