Google Lemonade: Google is making the icon layout worse

I know I said I was not going to waste my time talking about the Human Interface. But I realize these posts serve another function: rants to release my rage. I happen to still have a screenshot of what the layout looked like before this week from a photos-upload performance test. Fortunately, that test has became a total waste of my time because they fixed the bug by going back to their old upload software this week. And I wasted just my time to run the test since I haven't spent any time documenting the test.

This snapshot is big because I wanted to capture the "thermometer" and the performance metrics. Especially the 32 Mbps upload rate. That part of the new software was even a little better than the old software. The old software also achieved 32 Mbps, but not as consistently.

Zooming into the icons, I highlighted the two that I use most often, "URL edit" and "photo upload", in red. Yellow highlights the HTML edit toggle icon that I could no longer find yesterday. I had to abort testing the photo-insertion bug of putting the photo at the end of the post instead of at the cursor because the only way I have found to recover from the bug requires editing the HTML.

BTW, today (July 16, 2020) I discovered where the HTML toggle got moved to. It is that pencil on the left side of the long line icons in this snapshot from the current new version.

The popup of more icons went to just a horizontal line of icons. Until this week, it popped up a vertical window that included test describing each icon's function.  I don't mind that change because the mouse-over performance is decent. Note that the two icons I care about now require an extra click on the menu button. And I need the URL icon in the new version even more because I have to use it to proofread the current URL in existing hot text. (Yes, believe it or not, I do proofread my posts. Many times, more than once.) In the legacy version, I just had to click the hot text and the value would appear in a popup showing the beginning and end of the URL. All of the mouse clicks and keyboard strokes now required just to see the end of a current URL value really demotivates me to check that I have the correct URL in hot text. (Actually, I still check them, but with the legacy version.)

Today (July 16, 2020) they switched from the small row of icons to a pull-down menu and a button. Why??? The new format consumes more pixels to provide a redundant Update. It would be less bad if one of the Updates behaved like the legacy version and closed the page after the update was done. That is the behavior that I need because I don't do partial updates. I can't save my work in progress to the public because it is a work in progress. Instead, neither Update closes the page. I still have to hit the back arrow on the other side of the web page to close it.

Given the changes I've seen this week. Someone does care about the Human Interface. But their concern appears to be prettiness, not usability. This web page design is for a captive audience of blog authors, it is not your usual click-bait web page. I spend hours using this page design almost every day of the year, so usability and efficient use of pixels, not prettiness, are my main concerns. (You don't see most of my work because I'm adding new material to existing posts.)

Just add the new search function to the legacy version and be done with it. In fact, go back to the legacy version that you had a few years ago. The changes you did in the name of supporting multiple authors forces me to use a much wider page than the old old version required. At least get rid of that vertical pixel wasting white space above and below the B logo in that fat grey bar across the top. When I travel, I pack a monitor and haul it into motel rooms because the new legacy version wastes too much space on my laptop screen. My main desktop unit has 1920x1080 and 1080x1920 monitors that allow me to put the wasted space of my primary window on a secondary window.

And of course, Google's stated goal of making it easier to do updates with a mobile device is the exact opposite of what I want. I don't know if I have any postings with less than 144 words.






Now that I've tried to do some real work on the blog, I've discovered that they made another change in today's (July 16, 2020) version. They swapped the right two icons in this popup.

These are the two I use when adding a photo. The "pencil" is what I use to increase the size of the photo and the "two lines" is what I use to add a caption. I kept making mistakes before I realized that I could not work with old habits because they changed the location of the icons. (I poked around in the Help popup for something like an About that would provide a version id. No luck.)

Speaking of changes, it appears that the font is bigger for the captions and that they switched to a sans-serif font. But they still are not autoselecting "Add caption".  It turns out, this different caption formatting appeared only when updating a post. Later updates had the expected formatting. Another intermittent glitch is not good news.