Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Google's Weakness: User Experience

Paul Graham pointed out that someone could take advantage of Google's UX weakness in his article identifying a new search engine as a potentially disrupt-able industry for a highly ambitious founder.Google might not realize this, but they have a huge gaping weakness in User Experience. I have one Facebook account. I have 6 or 7 Google accounts. And they don't work well together. When I am trying to access my adwords, I need to sign in with my amirmotion gmail account using my zigfu.com email address as my login, and then I get this error because I'm still signed in to my catalystac.com account:

So in order to use Adwords, I need to log out of my catalystac.com google account and sign in with the appropriate gmail account, which for adwords, is zigfu.com. Due to my multiple accounts setup with Google, I have the same awful user experience with just about every google app. For blogger and youtube I need to use my amircatalystac gmail account (which is different from my catalystac.com account). I also have no idea how to access the admin panel for my catalytac.com domain, so I periodically can't access the documents that people send me in Google docs. Here's what I get when I try to click "Yes" to a google calendar request for RSVP in anything other than my tinkerheavy.com Google account:
My iPhone provides the only/easiest way for me to aggegate all these obnoxious multiple Google calendar and multiple Google email account issues and provide me with a single amir-centric user experience. Instead of this sort of awesome and consistent user experience, Google offers me MULTIPLE USER ACCOUNT HELL. The other issue with Google is there is no button I can push to send an email to complain to Google about my terrible user experience or to get support with improving it. Larry Page should be reading such an inbox, because this is a huge weakness for Google and they probably don't even realize how bad it stinks.