I have found that "best buddies" and "good manager" are not always correlated. That is to say, sometimes having a good personal relationship with a manager is a sign of a good manager and sometimes not; one does not imply the other.
On the one hand, being good friends with a manager may prompt one to go the extra mile because you're helping your dear friend (and perhaps vice versa). On the other hand, a deep friendship may cause you to ignore or downplay flaws or problems (that may seriously impact the customer, etc).
So all these tech startups are just good at raising fund? Is that a business model nowadays? It’s like this startup I worked for and I swear what we did best was hire people to do nothing...
You're not deceiving the customer. The problem is the customer depends on other inputs to make a decision. 99% of the time the decision has no rationale except social proof.
For example: If you went to buy 2 products next to each other at a store. They both do the same thing and same price, which do you take? The one that your neighbor bought or a random one?
For me whenever this happens, I most likely don't buy either unless I have a very specific need to get it.
This happens pretty often actually. The same early investors own the media companies so they get to push stories to get companies huge valuations. The media is there to make money too! One thing America lacks is public radio/tv whose goal is to serve the public. People keep forgetting that the media is private. Whoever controls the media controls the people.
well that's not panacea neither, since budget comes from government/state, and so with change of government leading directors are often changed too for 'a more compatible view'.
just look at post-soviet/eastern block media, we all have those (tv/radio) but nobody expects anymore true objectivity there.
Google and lots of companies continued to use brain teasers even when they realized it made no sense. Sure they wish to say this after using it for a long time. What I’ve realized sometimes there are barriers to prevent certain people and give a sense of meritocracy while justifying discrimination. It’s like when looking for an apartment, some landlords will only check some people’s backgrounds and not others. The same is true for credit card companies offering some people much lower apr than others for no reason other than prejudice. We could go on and on with examples, but that’s just a few.
In the end every company becomes average because there is only so many people they can hire. This has nothing to do with brain teasers per se.
I’ve worked in tech for over 10 years and I have to say the places I did the best work are interviews I somewhat bombed. Not a surprise!
Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion and sold it at a discount...Google just doesn't get user experience. Google bought so many user experience startups and yet they have nothing to show after so many years...
While I have complaints about Google, UX isn't one of them. I can't think of a Google product that is really all that unintuitive, undiscoverable, or difficult to use.
Am I missing something? I guess it can be rather subjective, but I don't have any complaints about UX or UI.
I should add that I've been told I'm too forgiving of bad design, so this is a legitimate question. I really don't see anything wrong with the UX from any of their products that are in common use.
I did have occasion to use one of their search appliances and the UX wasn't bad, but the results were pretty terrible. Terrible results might qualify as bad UX, I guess?
>While I have complaints about Google, UX isn't one of them. I can't think of a Google product that is really all that unintuitive, undiscoverable, or difficult to use.
>Am I missing something? I guess it can be rather subjective, but I don't have any complaints about UX or UI.
For me search is about everything Google got right. I use
Google Cloud and I can tell you, everything is buried somewhere and change without notification. Even something simple as billing, I have to search Google to find it. Same with G Suite. Something as simple as the admin interface is impossible to find. I never got G+ and don't see why they haven't killed it. People put up with gmail because there is nothing better. Try to change your profile picture. Android apps look terrible compared to ios and I have apps notifications I never knew existed and can't even tell where they're located. So many I can't list here.
> While I have complaints about Google, UX isn't one of them. I can't think of a Google product that is really all that unintuitive, undiscoverable, or difficult to use.
> Am I missing something? I guess it can be rather subjective, but I don't have any complaints about UX or UI.
At least for me, Google+ has long been a miserable experience. Facebook, with its faults and quirks, is still better in intuitiveness and UX (again, for me).
Another area is GSuite - it's been painful and confusing to understand and enable features for a personal account. The documentation is grossly inadequate (I did provide feedback) and doesn't explain what regional or other rollout differences that exist in the suite.
Try showing a senior how to use Gmail versus how to use Comcast or AOL. You'd be surprised how well the current generation of tech savvy folks are trained on Google's UI patterns... and how little sense they make for everyone else.
I've worked with a lot of seniors with home computer help, and Google software is practically a non-starter.
I am 59. I'm not sure that qualifies as senior, probably not.
As I said in my post, I may just be unable to see it. To me, it seems pretty straight forward. I can't think of a Google product where I had a bad user experience or found the user interface to be bad.
From YouTube to G+, I've not had any complaints about UX. certainly none worse than other services. They seem much like any other modern software. I'm absolutely not a savant, I can't even use GIMP or Blender.
I guess "senior" may be a poor choice of words here. The users I am speaking of are not just from outside of the generation that has grown up with computers in the home, but are not of the technical crowd. Suffice to say none of the people I provide support to are the sort to browse HN!
In reading your other replies, I kind of get what you're saying. Though, I'm not sure their icons are worse than any others? Whenever I find an icon that makes no sense, I click on it and find out what it does. Well, sometimes hovering over it will work.
That might be it, actually. I first touched a computer in the early 1970s. I'm not worried about breaking things, so I'll click buttons and see what they do.
I'm not sure that Google is worse than any other offender, though. Again, it is probably subjective.
If I had one complaint, it would be that I'm partially colorblind and this makes it difficult to differentiate certain things. Google isn't the worst offender but I guess that's a complaint that I have. I'm not sure if that is UI or UX?
I do wish they had a high-contrast option. I could probably make something but I just work around it.
Either way, thanks. This has been very informative.
My wife is happy enough with it. Sometimes, I hear her complaining about Gmail, that she can't add attachments. But otherwise, it seems to work for her.
Google seems to want to frequently re-invent common idioms willy-nilly.
They've had several iterations of email client for Android, from the AOSP client to Gmail to Inbox. I don't want a learning curve, just a mail client. (K-9 or Outlook for Android, cheers)
They've also had numerous goes at creating a sms/xmpp/talk/video app. Google Talk/Allo/Duo/Hangouts, it's all a confusing mess.
The two biggest issues I come across regularly is icons people don't understand the meaning of, and the fact that the UI changes frequently. I've found a lot of the people I work with learn how to do things, and then expect them to remain that way. Moving a button over two inches or putting it in a menu will send people calling me to come back because they don't know how to do something.
I have a lot of people literally ask me to repeat a process several times so they can write each step in doing things like attaching a file or forwarding an email down on paper. So when a button gets renamed or moved or even just has an icon instead of text, it throws people.
