- The UI design is inconsistent and ugly and has many usability issues
- Since there are inconsistincies in screen size it make it hard to write certain types of apps. Games in particular.
- The Android Market is broken, in many ways but primarily the checkout experience.
- Any app no matter how bad gets in.
- Google is not providing a good app-search experience.
- The tools that developers can use are not good enough to create great apps, only good ones
- Background apps kill the battery
- Every six months Google releases an OS update but it takes the carriers 8-12 months to roll out an update
- See #1
Posts Tagged ‘Google’
What’s wrong with Android
Jul 10
6
Quick Calendar UI Review – Google
Nov 09
19
This is a simple UI critique of a simple feature burried in Google Calendar. Here’s the original:
It’s a relatively simple form. It’s certainly not bad but I think it could be better. Here’s a quick mock up:
Here are the key design points:
- The body of the form has “What, When, Where” but doesn’t have “Who” if you’re having a meeting it stands to reason that the people attending are pretty important. I always felt that having guests hidden in the right didn’t make sense.
- The majority of meetings are measured in duration. 30 min, 45 min, 1 hour, 2 hour, all day, etc. It’s much easier to pick a common duration and allow “custom end time.” as a fall-back rather then making users select end times.
- Most meetings don’t repeat. Logically this is a secondary consideration. This can be moved to the secondary area on the right.
- Checking availability should be a secondary area action as well. Plus over on the right there’s more space to present availability in-line.
- It should be really easy to preview a location with a map.
- The current UI makes it difficult to add people to a meeting without the system automatically emailing them. You have to place names into the description area. Having a simple checkbox to email guests could solve this.
- There are a lot of simple UI 101 alignment things that can make the UI look cleaner and simpler just by lining fields up.
- The right hand side could be extensible with new modules, plug-ins, ala Google Labs.
5 Email Problems not Solved by Google Wave
Nov 09
10
Google wave is an interesting new technology for communication. In concept it’s supposed to fix many of the issues associated with email. While it solved some of the back & forth in traditional email threads it fails to solve a number key email issues and instead introduces it’s own set of problems by radicly changing how people work.
- It’s still not possible to easily tell if your message was received, read or even opened. Just like email you will never know if the important proposal made it.
- Information overload. The problem is finding what’s important. New things move to the top regardless of how important they are. Compare this to how you organize papers on your desk, important things move to the top.
- If you say something stupid you can’t take it back. Just like email once it’s out there you’re done. Even if the other person hasn’t seen it yet. They will now play it back in it’s full glory.
- Privacy. You can’t send something and keep the recipient from forwarding it on.
- Transfer of large files or collections. You can still attach things but if you want to share 50 wedding photos or a large home movie Wave won’t help you much. It’s a communication pipe but files are secondary citizens.
- Bonus #6. Spam. You’ll can still get it and you’ll still be expected to flag it. So there will be false positives. An extensive social network reputation doesn’t help. A lack of a social network doesn’t keep you from sending 1000′s of messages. It’s still early so there is little spam but this will change if this catches on.
Why the Chrome OS Matters
Jul 09
13
Two years ago I stood at Goolge’s mountain view campus in front of about 100 Linux desktop architects. The message I delivered was simple. Linux would never take off in it’s current form. A new strategy was needed and the core of this strategy was the web.
The arguments for Linux on the consumer desktop were not working:
- The main argument of Linux was that it’s a free alternative, however most people get PC’s with an OS pre-installed. From this perspective ‘free’ doesn’t matter because it’s built into the price.
- The second argument of Linux is ‘it’s open source.’ This argument carries some weight with businesses but a typical consumer doesn’t understand or care about open source.
- The third argument is speed. Not a bad argument but when most people only care about web-browsing and email the bottleneck is usually the dial-up connection, not the x86.
- Beyond that the argument isn’t very compelling. Linux provides the same abilities to launch basic apps, configure settings and has the same or often times worse compatibility issues with drivers.
The future OS is will be based on the web
- Current operating systems where all developed at their core before the web was invented. We know a lot about what users do on websites and we haven’t made any of that easier in the desktop OS.
- Files can show up on the desktop but live in the cloud
- Everything is backed up
- Web sites (apps) work online and offline
- When I double click on a file in the future it should be able to open in a web-based editor and that web-based editor should be able to save that file back to my desktop.
- I should not need to worry about installing and uninstalling stuff. I should just use the tools I need when I need them.
All these things are part of the Google portfolio and plan
- Google Chrome – the browser and it’s integration into Google Gears can be the foundation of very complex and rich desktop class apps.
- Google Docs is a web based editing suite that is obviously going after Office. The ability to click a file from your desktop and have it open online is too obvious not to happen.
- Google has said that it will target the OS toward ‘netbooks.’ If you haven’t realized it all laptops are becoming netbooks as you spend more and more of your time online.
An operating system based around the web is a really interesting proposition. It’s not about ‘Linux’ it’s about a better web experience. This is what consumers are doing understand and this is why this OS matters while Linux still does not.
When I gave my talk many of the Linux architects had good comments and discussion but quickly retuned to bickering about KDE vs. Gnome. It was the Google guys, lurking perhaps, that have taken the message to heart and are building a true OS with the web at it’s heart.
Scrollbar UI and Search Results
Sep 08
17
File this under awsome. A while back I posted an idea about having an ABC or Heatmap scrollbar. The idea was that you could show suplimentary information in the scrollbar area. Turns out that the recently launched Google Chrome uses a similar UI in their “Find” UI.
As you search you can see the matching occurances of the keyword in your document. I love it and hope there is a way to extend this so after visiting a search engine I can see the matching words on the resulting page.
Google Chrome Browser Review
Sep 08
3
Google surprised everyone when it recently released a web-browser named Chrome. The surprise was primarily due to the fact that Firefox seemed to be the Google darling for many years. As Google has grown, the dependency on browser technology has also grown.
As a search engine Google primarily displays HTML with some minimal JavaScript. But as an email, calendar, ad-network, blogging platform, news-reader and more, the dependencies on the browser have grown. To alleviate this Google has used projects like Google Gears, Google Toolbar, Google Web Toolkit and more to fill the gaps of the browser. Now it seems the stop-gap solutions are not enough.
First off… Google Chrome is not for everyone. In fact I may even say it’s not yet for anyone. It’s a Version 1 and it does a lot of things well but it’s not perfect and there are still a number of issues that need to get worked out. It also only works on Windows. That said it’s a pretty good V1.
Google stands on the shoulders of both Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s WebKit for many pieces of the browser. This could not have happened without open-source software. The primary rendering of pages seems quick and crisp and all pages in my initial testing seemed to work without a problem.
The key areas where the Chrome browser is different:
- Opening a new tab
- Auto-completing a URL
- Overall look and feel
- Incognito
- What’s missing – Plug-ins, spellcheck, etc.
Opening a new tab
Opening a new tab in Chrome brings up a page with the top sites you visit and allows you to quickly pick either an existing site or browse to a new site. This is a great idea. Reasearch shows that users re-visit the same 5-7 sites over and over again and often they type the website name each time. Firefox 3 keeps track of your recent sites but this takes it to the next leval and allows you quickly and visually identify and open a site. I love it and expect to see this in other browsers very soon.
Auto-completing a URL
When you start typing a URL into the address bar Google chrome automatically starts searching your history, your bookmarks and Google itself via Google Suggest. As anyone who’s done reasearch on search knows that one of the most common things typed into any search engine is a URL. By combining search and URL’s you have one stop shoping for typing a site name, a bookmark or a search. I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse then Firefox it’s just a little different. Some users may appreciate the change while others may find it annoying.
Overall Look and Feel
The overall look is very clean and minimal. It reminds me a lot of Safari on the Mac. The buttons are minimal, there are no draggable toolbars, no hidden menus when you hold Alt, no bookmark manager, no spinning logo, no toolbar customization. The browser does it’s best to stay out of your way.
- The find on page dialog floats cleanly within the window
- The download page doesn’t get lost in a secondary window
- The status areas comes and goes as you hover over links never stealing space from your overall browser.
Showing IE, FF and Chrome displaying 1px of vertical content you can see that Chrome is much thinner:
In general this means that more space is given to your content and less to the ‘chrome’.
Incognito
In Safari it’s called “Private Browsing” in Mozilla there’s an extension called ‘Distrust’ in IE the often talked about but never implemented ‘promiscuous mode.’ In Chrome the feature is called Incognito aka ‘porn mode’ creates a seperate window that is free from the browser cache, history or other identifiable data.
I’ll just say it’s an interesting feature to include considering the other features that have not been included.
What’s missing
As I said previously I don’t consider Chrome to be a complete browser. There is no bookmark managment, no visible support for plug-ins, no spellchecker, no way to set a home-pages, etc. etc. Some of the tools you depend on may not be available. For some people this isn’t a big deal for others it’ll be a show-stopper.
The big deal is performance
In initial testing Chrome seems to be significantly faster at rendering complex pages then both IE and Firefox. The difference is visually noticable as pages pop and complex interactive sites like Gmail load with new found speed.
This performance is undoutably one of the key reasons that Google decided to invest in it’s own browser. The engine driving Chrome’s Javascript is a new peice of technology that does for JavaScript what Java had promissed to do years ago.
The added performance does come as some cost in terms of memory:
Sure it’s faster but look at all the memory it’s using. 80 megs for a browser is about 4 times what firefox and Internet explorer use. On modern computers memory performance tends to be cheap. Of course you want fast and minimal memory but if you had to choose one I’ll take the performance.
Other details
- Chrome has a feature to turn a page into a desktop appication. This is simlar to the Prism concept from Mozilla. This is the future. I was very happy to finally see this in a shipping product.
- There is a development mode that’s preety slick. It’s not quite Firebug but it’s pretty good.
- View Source formats and displays a good looking source page
- Browser settings, bookmarks and other data import nicely
- Spell Check. I miss you.
- Tabs can be ‘torn’ off similar to Safari to create a new window, tabs can also be re-ordered by dragging.
- The browser passes the Acid-test 2 and does OK on acid test 3 (77/100)
- Accessibility and keyboard shortcuts seem to work well
Overall a good V1. It’ll eat away market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox in limited places but for the most part I see this as a technology preview. The power of Firefox is still it’s extensive plug-in and customizations. The power of IE is it’s enterprise deployments and OEM’s. In the short term Chrome doesn’t change that but longer terms it’s certainly a large peice in this puzzle. Either way the Google browser will help push the state-of-the-art in open source web browser development.