Stuff like this makes me consider less about ever applying to Google. idk, they've got smart people at their company, but there seems to be an underlying disconnect with real everyday users. I think autistic would be too harsh to describe their collective mindset...
They have real every day users, but Google doesn't understand those users. Many Googlers eat at Google, play at Google, and most of their friends are other Googlers.
You'll notice Google has almost no comprehension of real people's lives. Google designers have never had to do work on a 1024x768 screen at the office.
Googlers live in a bubble where technology is perfect, which is why they seem to believe technology can solve a lot of human issues much easier than they actually can. For them, it's possible.
I think this is a little hyperbolic but not too much. I'd expect a similar mindset and internal use of G+ is a large reason it wasn't scrapped a year ago.
Google understands users better than you think. They mine millions of interactions to see what people are doing so understand what is liked and not liked. This prank was not a data driven so back fired.
Google has automated this process. They don't do nearly enough actual interaction with actual users about problems. This is actually an example of what I'm talking about. Where they assume an automated data collector is more valuable than even just sitting down with one person and watching them use the website.
Google understands users the same way an AI will understand what a sunset is, and why people like to look at them. It'll be able to tell you it's yellow orange, happens at 6:10pm eastern time, from your GPS coordnates will be appear x cm wide, has a brightness value of y, etc. It'll understand the uniqueness of the color range.
But the AI won't really understand why people watch a sunset.
The UX researchers here at Google DO in fact sit down with many people and watch them use all sorts of parts of google, gmail, etc. In fact they go out of their way to run usability studies in various parts of the countries, because, you know, selection bias.
Also automated data is collected.
The real problem here is, if you have X million users, can you really know them as a unified set of people? Of course not.
Sure this prank backfired, but hey, have some compassion for the people who worked on it. They were trying to be funny, and trying to bring a little light to people's life. There was no intention of ruining anyone's day.
I am opted into their user studies group. I haven't seen a new invitation in a couple of years now. And the way they handle user studies, opt in via Google Form, they still see a particularly biased community: Hardcore Google users, most likely technical in nature.
If Google went to a senior citizens' home, and watched how some of their less technically inclined users used their products, I'm confident Google would fire everyone with the word "designer" in their title and start over.
But this is largely immaterial to this particular joke. The joke was funny. The choice to implement it for real was not.
So, what you're saying is, from your limited view point, you have a conclusive overview of all of UX? Also, Google designers are intensely incompetent and deserve to be fired?
I dunno, you sure are quick to judge a very difficult subject area.
Google designers ARE intensely incompetent. And design's a pretty simple subject area. The problem is, designers need to justify their continued jobs, after a product is launched. So there's a constant set of increasingly more complicated overengineering projects to "redesign" things to stay "trendy". Generally sacrificing usability in exchange.
Ever since Google hired their "VP of Design", their products have heavily shifted away from being functionally useful.
There's a reason Gmail is the last bastion of competent design at Google. There's a reason that even Googlers said they wouldn't use Gmail if Inbox became the "new Gmail", and this is probably where this conversation rounds back to this prank:
Because if that is "functionally useful" then I will happily continue using trendy. The thing with design is that it is not a simple subject area. You are constantly balancing several (somtimes mutually exclusive) objectives.
At the end of the day, blame end-users. They use the products that are "trendy" and look nice. They dictate good design.
My not really updated portfolio page isn't really intended to be 'useful', lol. Though the navigation is much clearer than many websites today, and the pages load on pretty much any device nearly instantaneously.
You highlight my exact point: To you design is purely functional. To the overwhelming majority of people it isn't. That's the reason Google's Design initiative (Material Design) was started in the first place. Good design practices across all Google Services.
You want bad design, try most of the AWS tools. You can have both functionality and appeal. Pretending they are mutually exclusive is silly.
