Get our Newsletter!This has been driving me crazy for a while now, and I just had to say something.
A colleague of mine recently forwarded me a link to the Official Google Blog post about eye tracking studies they used for their universal search results. Very interesting stuff, and I don’t doubt the technique is effective.
However, Google is far from perfect in actually applying their UI “brand” on each of their applications. It’s irritating, at best.
The Official Google Blog has another post describing what goes into their Google-y UI brand. It’s a fairly generic and utilitarian list, but I suppose it’s accurate across their web applications.
What really starts to irritate me is the lack of effort Google has put into a bunch of their web applications, mainly with regards to graphic design. If you know anything about me, you’ll know I never claim to be good as a graphic designer (I’m a developer… big difference). That being said, Google has done a great job with applications like Google Analytics — but they completely failed on other applications like Webmaster Tools and Adsense. Even the AdWords portal looks really basic.
Let’s be honest — the tools I specifically just mentioned (Webmaster Tools, AdSense, and AdWords) are all about reporting; thus, the UI doesn’t exactly need to be eye-catching. All three applications are (from a development perspective) technically complex; they all rely heavily on AJAX, and they pull data from god-only-knows how many Google servers and databases.
But with all of the resources Google has, why can’t they at least make the UI for their tools look nice? I’m not even talking about smooth Photoshop layouts, just something that doesn’t suck.
Beyond just basic graphic design, the navigation for AdSense and AdWords is less than intuitive (Webmaster Tools is okay…). For a company that boasts about how they nail the UI in universal search, they really messed up.
AdSense has, in my opinion, one of the worst reporting portals of a web application that I’ve even seen. The data Google lets you see is almost worthless, and the reporting formats are terrible. You mean they couldn’t create useful (and cool) Flash graphs/reports like they have in Analytics? Are you kidding?
Don’t even get me started on why Webmaster Tools isn’t just bundled together with Analytics. I mean come on… they really ought to just be one tool.
I’m basically just ranting at this point… but does anyone agree? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!
