[moshmosh]

> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.

Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is.

(Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible)

[EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.

[saurik]

Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me to click on at this point?" I just automatically click the wrong thing every time. Like, there is even a dialog that pops up in one of the loops I often get caught in with a "cancel" button that seriously cancels my attempt to cancel something, which my brain just can't wrap itself around fast enough :(.

[moshmosh]

I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.