Wow. As a long-time user of almost (read: not G+) everything Google has made, I was just admiring the UI, thinking "How nice of them to make this for people who don't even know how to check their email..." and then I spot this:
This is a brilliant content and feature discovery tool. Any other company would've just created a long list of products with short descriptions for each.
This could go either way really. Either you think that Google is such a monstrosity with all these parts that don't really fit together which makes for bad UX or you think that Google's services are something we should be thankful for and that this display of free stuff is the kind of really nice UX only Google can deliver.
I think the implication that Google's UX is a monstrosity isn't really warranted based on the content of this page.
Most of these fall into a few categories:
1. Hey, this service exists (Google Contacts, Google Keep, Google News)
2. Look at this intermediate-level thing you can do with this service (Install apps from the web interface of the Play store, make playlists on YouTube, natural language semantic Google search)
3. Bad UX (hey, you can share map search results!)
Google has a lot of services (leading to #1); a lot of users are very cautious about using computers in general and won't try to explore to find intermediate or advanced usages (even though they're very useful and HN would probably bitterly complain about their being taken out); the UX is sometimes bad but having user education doesn't automatically imply that.
Have we really gotten so addicted to onboarding that any feature that can't be explained in a 30-second "welcome to Google" tour should just be shafted? I really like being able to install Android apps from my laptop, but even if I was told that in the Android "welcome to Android" screen that I first saw years ago and haven't seen since, I'd have forgotten it.
Using any tool as an expert requires some amount of education. Is it really desirable to build tools that cannot be used as an expert? What would the world be like if the only tools that existed were only usable at the beginner level?
By "this", do you mean an intuitive natural-language one-stop-shop to get information from across all of Google's properties? Seems like pretty terrific UX design to me.
Or by "this" did you mean Tips -- i.e. is your argument that you shouldn't ask your users for discoverability advice? If so, I can see how doing so requires a bit of indifference to embarrassment, and a lack of care as to what snobs might think, but hey, discoverability is hard.
How would you design a way to teach users they can do queries like this?
I don't know if you have multiple google accounts (I have personal gmail, personal analytics and some work related accounts).
Try this: Go to Google.com as a logged in user and try to "switch" to your new account. What was originally one click to logout and one click to bring up a un/pw now takes a ton of additional user interaction.
I'm no Jony Ive but whoever thought this was a good workflow needs to reconsider.
I have two accounts: my personal account and a work account. Until a few minutes ago, I had never signed in to my work account from my home computer.
I tried to "switch" to my new account, as you described. It took about 10 seconds, which was the time it took to load a new page and type out my credentials. Furthermore, as soon as I did that, I could instantly switch between accounts with two clicks and without having to log out of either account. What's the problem?
My point is that the solution before was more elegant, since it was just a pop-up flow with single clicks to log out and log in. The whole rigmarole now is just the way all the Google apps feel to me now. Extra hoops to jump through, I guess I'd describe it as?
Fair enough; I can see your point. I think the other side of the coin is that, once you've logged into all your accounts, it's much easier to switch back and forth between accounts.
Google has an incredible user experience considering its depth (although many would argue that being feature rich is a negative when it comes to user experience design, take Netflix's UI for example, which has only become simpler over time).
This reminds me heavily of the IFTTT recipes (https://ifttt.com/recipes). Google has so many parts that sometimes you need a little guidance to see how they fit together in a useful way.
Google has so many features that users don't know about that they created a site that (1) gives users a random listing of their products and features to sort through, and (2) lets Google see which features/services get the most interest from the uninitiated users.
Every single card I flipped over had "Stuff you'll need: a Google account" and an early step that was "Sign in."
Google is on a real push lately to get people to stay signed into its services all the time. This, to me, feels like another pair of hands helping in that push.
Fine for me. Get the latest version of Chrome (it includes some anti-aliasing differences). Maybe just restart your browser if update is already downloaded.
Since Google can't get one of their flagship services, "Google Now", to actually work[0], even after a year or so of user complaints, and this is on one of these cards, I'm not really motivated to try any of this other stuff out.
https://www.google.com/get/googletips/card/ask-google-to-fet...
Which I had no idea about.
This is a brilliant content and feature discovery tool. Any other company would've just created a long list of products with short descriptions for each.