2013/07/04

#34. The Google combo box and usability: how to forget the user


This is an old post that I had on my Hubpages account criticising Google Reader, and with Reader's disappearance I want to re-post again here instead of Hubpages.

google combo box
What's happening in Google? They have forgotten users? Gmail and other products have been famous for letting users be as fast as possible with keyboard shortcuts but recently I have noticed that in some pages they are using some kind of custom combo box that does not fulfill those parameters.

In Google Reader if you want to search for a post in just one of your subscriptions you have to scroll down until you find it, until now you could press a key where the combo entry was its initial and the combo would scroll down until it finds it, as almost any combo box in any website. Scrolling down almost a thousand subscriptions to find one is not funny. I thought maybe they starting to forget Google Reader in favour of other products.

But today found out the same problem in the advanced search, trying to filter by country, wait...that's Google Search, the king's jewel, how can this be happening too? Maybe they are starting to forget us, maybe they are becoming the next Microsoft?

As some partners have said to me, maybe this change is due to tactile devices, as you may have seen on your mobile or tablet when touch a combo box it opens in a dialog and you don't have a keyboard so you have to scroll. I don't really know the reason, you can check the image.


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