Technology & Society
Alex Bäcker
2011
1 min readThe author identifies two significant user interface flaws in Google's design: the homepage search layout, which potentially hinders advertising revenue, and the inefficient attachment process in Gmail that neglects common user actions.
Google's most visible UI mistake is on their home page, and always has been. It highlights that if their search engine actually worked as well as it should, they would make absolutely no advertising revenue from search. And it's contrary to efficient design principles --you don't make two buttons whose usage differs by orders of magnitude of equal saliency.
Their second one is the way to attach a file in Gmail. Attaching a file and adding cc's are by far email writers' most common actions. Yet Google devotes as much real estate to them as to making the email right-aligned, for example --something I have never done in 22 years of writing email. Which means people waste time. Lots of people. All the time. Duh.