Comments on: Dial tone moments

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 23:33:26 +0000

“Dial tone moments”, I love it! What a great analogy, and I really enjoy reading these posts; they offer a fascinating insight into the inner workings of Google.

By: Brad Taylor

Brad Taylor — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 01:18:29 +0000

It seems to me that I have the hardest time with Google applications. They are never very easy to use. To set a homepage in Google Chrome you really have to dig to do it. It should be a simple action like right clicking. Within the analytics and Google Plus areas, things are buried so deep that to simply edit ones profile takes multiple steps. It is like the engineers at Google have decided to be so smart they made their apps harder for simple things. Everything should be more user friendly and the simple things need to stay simple. I think Google needs to hit the factory reset button and start over with alot of their stuff. IMO

By: Roger

Roger — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:16:04 +0000

Another term I have heard for this is paper cut. That may have more longevity than dial tone as I suspect paper will long outlive the analogue phone system despite predictions of paper's demise going back decades.

By: Michael VanDeMar

Michael VanDeMar — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:06:17 +0000

Ok, here’s a second* great example: “Sorry, but our system has determined you may be a spammer.” <- that being triggered because I posted 1 link to a Marketing Land article that was relevant to this discussion. Sure, you can of course flag whatever you like… but the blog ate the comment as well, instead of rejecting it and giving me a chance to edit it. I know, you're not Google, but still.

*the first example was in the comment that got eaten.

By: Michael VanDeMar

Michael VanDeMar — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 00:03:03 +0000

By the way, it's not just buggy products that Google should look at when looking for more 'dial tone' moments. The randomness of enforcements of some Google policies, like what is highlighted in this article today on Marketing Land, is a great example of something that should be looked in to for improvement: Google AdSense Strikes Again With Vague, Arbitrary Warning Over An Ancient Article And realize, it's not about 1 article getting flagged, it's about the semi-randomness of this type of flagging over many years.

By: Michael VanDeMar

Michael VanDeMar — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:55:21 +0000

It just occurred to me that there is probably a sizable segment of the younger population in this country that have never even heard a dial tone, possibly never will, and would have no idea what it was you were referring to… and that many of the ones that have it was just a digital sound effect. It doesn’t make me sad, but it’s definitely a “Huh” moment for me.

Regarding the post, it does seem at times like Google doesn’t have a large enough QA department to fully test all of the products or product changes when they go live. Has any thought been given in to a public bug tracking system for Google services? I know there is the support forums, but that’s really not the same thing. As far as I know the only actual bug tracker is for Chrome, and that has 67,401 open issues in it.

By: Andrea Silver

Andrea Silver — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:46:05 +0000

The door with an automatic opener: there is a rule that preserves the “magical moment.”
*Always a manual option,* that way if the door does not open automatically you are not forced to go to the other door, you simply must exercise the manual option on the automatic door.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:30:56 +0000

Roger, I’m with you. My wife tried Google Music a while ago and then stopped because streaming music didn’t work well for her when she was walking, and the “pin” metaphor wasn’t a good match for her.

I think Google could do a lot more to simulate low-bandwidth or crappy connections. There’s also stuff like the Chaos Monkey from Netflix that tries to kill random processes to test how robust a system is: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 21:17:09 +0000

Matt, for what it’s worth I totally agree. Google’s products usually have good uptime, but we can often improve on speed and even more so on little product details like you mention.

By: Roger

Roger — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 17:40:19 +0000

Sometimes regular dogfooding isn’t enough. Google Music is a good example where it works just fine if you have a high speed reliable network as the Google campus does, and presumably most Google employees have at home, and heck even on the buses. But when using it while out driving where coverage comes and goes and it is a monumental pain, often going silent or aborting playback because of transient connectivity issues. It misses the user’s fundamental goal – play me some music, and keep playing.

For work, I ended up setting a wifi access point with Linux traffic shaping behind it to have atrocious random behaviour in terms of latencies, packet drops etc. (My colleagues call it the AT&T simulator.) So much mobile software performed badly mainly because the devs had made networking synchronous with the user interface. Perhaps the Google campus could do with a similar network?