Rarely do I ever incorporate pop culture references into my small business posts, but since I’m finishing this post while watching the end of Season 6 of How I Met Your Mother, I will disagree with Mr. Barney Stinson when he says, “New is always better.”
First let me begin by saying that for the most part, I really like Google. They do some great stuff, and it’s almost all for free. Except of course the Paid Advertising. But there is a part of Google’s business model that really bugs me – using it’s clients as guinea pigs to test new products. We don’t have to rehash what has been over-articulated in regards to Google wave, Gmail privacy policy changes, Google buzz, and the list of changes and discontinued products goes on and on.
My issue, and the part that adds extra time to my work load, is the constant changes in core products like analytics and adwords in particular. It seems that the developers get tired of the current UI, and see how many times a year they can make changes that seldom actually add to the experience or the ability of the customer to do more work efficiently.
The latest analytics changes are a great example. Ok sure, some of the new features help to take a look at some of the visitor data a little easier, but not most of them. Where did content page navigation go? All the way up next to Explorer, which was overview under Traffic Sources before the tab changed – what is it doing up there?
Like any new product, there will be feature updates, UI changes and with those come a new learning curve. What irks me is that Google makes changes that might make sense from a developer or even (sometimes) a design perspective, but it very much seems that they don’t consider the user perspective.
The left hand navigation tree is another good example. Previously, subcategories were pretty easily visible and navigable, but now in order to see everything, you need to click each item, and scroll six times because the page height increased astronomically.
I think that even though some of the actionable items under each main category were formerly a touch confusing while in page, they still were all in one spot and after the initial learning curve, were workable. Now the left subcategories are disconnected from the pages on which they are actionable.
To be honest, I’m in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff so I really don’t want to be inconvenienced again to re-acclimate myself. So take the moaning with a grain of salt. It’s a free tool and complaining about it won’t ever do any good. And we'll all keep using it anyway.
Sometimes Google, new isn’t always better.