"It still blows my mind how companies with billions of dollars to burn get UI wrong. Like the first Windows 10."
It's much harder to build a UI that a billion people like than one that a hundred people like.
Startups have the luxury of being able to pick their customers. They can (and should) make the UI really, really tailored to their initial customers, because that's all they've got. Nail that and the initial customers evangelize the product, and bring new customers in.
Big companies do not have that luxury. Most peoples' desires are contradictory; some people like things one way, other people like it another way, some people want it configurable just the way they want it, most people get confused and leave if you put in too many knobs and configuration options. When you're doing UI design for a billion-dollar company, you have to shoot for the middle-ground that will piss off the fewest people. That's invariably something that doesn't make people all that excited either.
I was involved in 4 UI redesigns for Google Search, one as the first engineer, two as a tech lead, and one as a consultant. Usually the version we launched was a pale shadow of some of the cooler ideas that the UI designers came up with, and made nobody particularly excited, including the people who designed it. But that's the reality of serving over a billion people. Every feature cut was cut because it would make the design unusable for some fraction of the userbase; every misfeature added was added because somebody really wanted it, and in most cases we had the metrics to prove it.
There is no excuse for the failure of Win 10 it was just a ball of confusion.
As for Google Search, why can't they just offer features for those who want them? I wan't long pages of results, not short, I want inverted colours, don't want search results that don't include a term etc..
"As for Google Search, why can't they just offer features for those who want them?"
Heh. I am intimately familiar with the road that leads down...
My first project at Google was the Search Options panel [1]. This was a collapsible left-nav with a bunch of additional tools that you could use to help refine, visualize, or otherwise improve your search results. Many of these tools were very useful to certain populations (one that I worked on was called Wonder Wheel [2] and was very popular with teachers, reporters, and advertisers) and virtually useless to everyone else. Why was this panel collapsible? So that we could offer these features to just those who wanted them without cluttering the UI for everyone else.
Many of these tools got very low usage despite rave reviews. Why? Well, when we interviewed users, they didn't know they existed. On Hacker News discussions I'd direct-link people to a specific tool like custom date range or verbatim mode, and they'd be like "Wow, this is so useful. I had no idea this existed. You guys should make this obvious in the UI."
So my 3rd project at Google, a visual redesign of all of Search [3], included an always-open left nav.
After an initial bump, though, usage numbers for all the tools started dropping off. One interesting effect that you find out, if you do enough metrics-based UI design, is that people become blind to features they don't use. These tools were special-purpose enough that the majority of searchers - who just want to get to their result as fast as possible - were becoming blind to the whole left nav. So the order came down that we needed to hide most of the tools, and only show the ones that we could predict would be likely to be used on the particular query.
Well, we did that, but another principle of UI design is that controls should appear in a predictable order and not move around, so that people can build habits around their use. Changing the set of tools displayed per query violates that principle.
Eventually, after a few more redesigns, the left nav moved to the top nav and most of the tools were discontinued anyways. Many of the features you want actually exist, and I bet you don't know about them. You can get long results through Settings -> Search Settings -> Results per page, for example, and you can prevent Google from inferring what you really mean via Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim. But that sorta proves my point, right? You can't really please everyone - even if you build the features they need, there's no guarantee they'll know about them.
It's much harder to build a UI that a billion people like than one that a hundred people like.
Startups have the luxury of being able to pick their customers. They can (and should) make the UI really, really tailored to their initial customers, because that's all they've got. Nail that and the initial customers evangelize the product, and bring new customers in.
Big companies do not have that luxury. Most peoples' desires are contradictory; some people like things one way, other people like it another way, some people want it configurable just the way they want it, most people get confused and leave if you put in too many knobs and configuration options. When you're doing UI design for a billion-dollar company, you have to shoot for the middle-ground that will piss off the fewest people. That's invariably something that doesn't make people all that excited either.
I was involved in 4 UI redesigns for Google Search, one as the first engineer, two as a tech lead, and one as a consultant. Usually the version we launched was a pale shadow of some of the cooler ideas that the UI designers came up with, and made nobody particularly excited, including the people who designed it. But that's the reality of serving over a billion people. Every feature cut was cut because it would make the design unusable for some fraction of the userbase; every misfeature added was added because somebody really wanted it, and in most cases we had the metrics to prove it.