Wow.... I got excited for finally a single place to go for hangouts (I was always confused at the best "launch point") and a better interface (chat on gmail hasn't changed in what feels like a decade) and lo and behold... It's a pretty launch interface but the SAME CRAPPY CHAT WINDOWS... I've always felt like hangouts was a horribly mismanaged product (starting and joining a hangout has always been a longer and more difficult process than it should) and this just confirms it.
There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).
2) Upon need, click on that, wait for URL to change, and then send resulting URL over $IM_SYSTEM_OF_CHOICE
Best UI I've found so far to what I think is a pretty stellar video/voice communication product. Now if they would only fix hardware acceleration on Mac...
What would you want to use it for? It seems like HOA sessions for most of the use cases that spring to mind would be scheduled ahead of time, and therefore not suffer as much from the bad-contact-list issue.
There are all kinds of gaps even then. For example, you can't invite a google organization (company) to the event directly in any smooth fashion. The solution is to copy the link and e-mail it to your list. After that, there's no way to restrict viewing of the recording to an organization.
This is just one example of a poor integration between two Google products, but those few little gaps in permissions and utility made it a product that didn't work for my needs at least.
Definitely I want to schedule them ahead of time! But then when the time comes, Will it even work? Last week for the life of me I could not get the Record button to come up on the HOA I had scheduled a week prior and for which I saved the URL. I cycled through all my Google accounts hoping I had mistakenly created it in another account, but no luck. And no feedback whatsoever regarding what my privileges were in the Hangout, nor any indicator in the Google Plus homepage or Hangouts dashboard for my accounts. So I gave up. I know I created this darn HOA with one of my accounts, you HAVE to be logged into a Google account to create one! Like I said, HOA is a killer product, but it's sad that has only become less useful since it first came out, since now I can't even use it at at all!
Starting a hangout often works for me, but I rarely get notification messages. Sometimes it takes half an hour or more to get a notification that was sent by someone in the same room. I switched to SMS for IMs, because people don't get the Hangouts messages reliably.
Hangouts could be good, but it's awful at the moment. I wish they had at least kept the XMPP integration. I strongly suspect that Google would be more successful if they went back to a more open approach. If they had backed Diaspora rather than creating Google Plus, it would now be huge. Google Plus didn't even have a decent API. I have a lot of ideas on how to salvage it, but no one at Google has ever responded to my suggestions.
In the list of unreliable messaging, Skype Android app has been nicely random in how it notifies me too. I can never know if someone talked or not. They keep changing the UI though, how touching.
ps: I believe all your points on xmpp/diaspora are right, and that's how Google got popular, bringing good product (mail, maps) for free. Not trying to invent a whole G paradigm because Jobs said 'focus' in an Apple keynote.
The Skype app for Android and Linux were so bad that I stopped using Skype completely. I thought that Hangouts was going to be a perfect replacement, but the notifications became too unreliable. If anyone from Google is reading my comments, and would like ideas on how to fix it, send me a message. I do want Hangouts to work. :)
What exactly is wrong with the Hangouts UI? Admittedly I've only used it a few times, but it's always seemed leagues ahead of the unusable mess that Skype has become.
The complaint is not usually about the in-videoconference UI, but about the general product and overall confusing portfolio of applications that exist under the Hangouts moniker.
There's the Android app which replaced GTalk, which also does (or used to do?) SMS, this new thing, the Google+ builtin UI, and a few others (what's the successor to the GTalk Windows app?).
I have been in Hangouts-on-air sessions were I had to intervene to send a proper link to a guest because the hosts could not figure it out.
Your question right here appears to be evidence of that: I don't even know which UI I should criticize for you as I'm not sure we are even talking about the same product.
In-videoconference, I think they are on-par or slightly ahead of Skype after the latter's update (it used to be much worse). Some things are better (warns you that you are muted if it hears you speaking while muted) and some are worse (in-videoconference text messages exist in a weird limbo that only lasts the duration of the Hangout, and have no history tracking).
In my opinion, it's the general "contact list"/"IM product" UI that is a bigger mess. My Hangouts app on Android keeps getting "unread" Hangout sessions from videoconference sessions I did on my computer. I sometimes get Hangout invites on my phone, sometimes on G+ and sometimes over e-mail (?). I think this aspect is what the OP was talking about when speaking about the lost opportunity. The general experience for a Hangouts-the-IM-product user is still very confusing.
Google's UX/design now reminds of MSN/Hotmail/Yahoo of 10 years ago. All the pointless image-heavy neutral visual noise. Why on earth are you showing me that waterfall background? I don't want your watered down elevator music.
Google needs to remember why Gmail, Reader, etc ended up destroying the aforementioned products in terms of UX, and change the direction it's headed at.
Google has some of the worst UIs in the tech industry. Materials Design is not good. Google Plus is so bloated with JS that it wouldn't run on my netbook with 4 Gb of RAM. The animations and "cute" easings make me feel uncomfortable whenever I open a Google product. Gmail is only tolerable when loaded through Thunderbird.
Google does well when they stick to the Craig's List school of graphic design. If G+ looked like Craig's List and had a good API, it would have done much better. One of their mistakes is that they are trying to be innovative in an area that they have never been good at (design). It would be better to be very conservative with design and focus on being innovative in their strong areas (e.g., data).
Constructive feedback: get rid of the animations, stop cropping profile photos into circles, and go much lighter on the JavaScript, abandon Materials Design and model everything off the Google homepage: think "information not animation."
I don't think GMail is pretty, but it's very functional. Good UX != visual beauty.
As a result of a fairly recent job change, I have been forced into desktop IMAP clients again. I have to admit I have discovered a whole new level of appreciation for GMail.
Just the fact that it actually runs filters server-side and it has a (conceptually speaking) equivalent application for mobile devices trumps everything else. You can actually get it do to what you want.
The company I work for has a very heterogeneous systems landscape and I can say without much hesitation that GMail + Gcal's only serious alternative is Outlook. Everything else seems to me like a digital version of pen and paper.
I think that IMAP-serverside filtering is possible: https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter I haven't really looked into exactly what it's doing though (and I'm no expert on the IMAP spec).
Seems like that is just a command-line version of an e-mail client filter: it connects to the server, runs a query, and moves stuff to folders. Based on my experience with the average IMAP server search performance, I wouldn't let my users use this if I was in control of the server.
Google had a nice distortion field. I recently tried Bing maps by accident and having a fast, light and smooth UI felt so good. Inertia and brand makes me still go to Google maps but I miss the old one. 2nd system effect is a damn curse.
I've always wondered why there is no dedicated Hangouts website. I always had to choose between Gmail and Google Plus to send a message. This may have been a way to encourage the uses of their other services? Anyways, finally they made a reasonable choice.
The chat window looks still elementary, though. I expected it to expand to fit the browser window. But it is still the tiny one that can be seen in Gmail and Google Plus, which is a bit annoying to use.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but that is a considerable amount of wasted space (Hi, rp1229!
Get started by calling or messaging a friend below). I thought my messages would show up there, but nope, they just show up on the bottom similar to other Google sites.
Namely, Joe-the-user can't see the hamburger menu at the top and looks for more tools where they are supposed to be: after the first few tools. So the UX guys at Google put an affordance there for him [0].
I've seen this quite a few times, especially for interactions where the search box is within the hamburger-driven overlay. Some sites/systems add a dummy, redundant search box on the main UI that just opens the hamburger menu and focuses on the newly-displayed search box.
Am I the only one that longs for what used to be the awesomeness that is gchat?
Gchat with what hangouts has for calls/voice/video would've basically been the win. Instead it constantly feels like this buggy/gimped browser app that maybe/maybe doesn't work.
I'm confused. Shouldn't the large space on right be where the IM window was supposed to pop in? Is it just a launch interface for already-available hangout app?
This might actually be slower than my current solution for hangouts, which is to open an empty circle in Google+. (If I open the Google+ home page, I see lots of social feed activity that a) I don't care about and b) takes a while to load.)
I'm often behind a slow public-wifi network and restricted on battery, so the amount of bandwidth and CPU used just to get me to text chat is actively a problem. I miss the XMPP days.
oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?
I was an XMPP enthusiast. Sadly, it never made the jump to mobile properly. I wish they had amended the standard to to add a session manager that would work well with mobile. Instead, last I check, everyone implemented their own hack. Google first, with Android GTalk. They used ProtoBufs [1]
Hey, did you know WhatsApp was based on XMPP? Yeah, good luck using that with an open client: their terms of service allows them to kick you off for using an unofficial client.
[1] I've come to think ProtoBufs would make a perfectly good transport for a hypothetical XMPP2. It's better packed, can be better framed, and as far as I've glanced allows the same extensibility as XML gave XMPP.
> oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?
I ran my XMPP client on a UNIX server, to which I connect using mosh. As it happens, I tend to have this mosh connection open all the time to do actual work, so there's no additional overhead from running an XMPP client remotely.
(Still, there's no particular reason that a persistent though quiet TCP connection needs to drain battery any more than any approach; a TCP connection can stay open indefinitely without traffic if nothing in between the applications decides to time it out.
There might be complications on actual mobile platforms like phones, if your platform's push notification system does abstraction-crossing magic with the cell networks, such that you can shut down your data connection entirely until it needs to be woken up. But my use case is a laptop, so a constant IP connection is assumed.)
I'm a geek too, but I think a time comes when we have to recognize that these kind of roundabout solutions, while fun and a testament to the flexibility of our systems, won't cut it if you want your protocol to take over the world (which the XMPP community was tongue-in-cheekily aiming for in the mid-00's).
And besides, I was trying to focus the discussion specifically on mobile, which is the major platform today.
I'm really disappointed with the new babel that has emerged in the mobile chat world.
Yes, that's absolutely fair. As a more general solution, you could build a very lightweight mobile app or website that used a server as a relay, and whose interface involved only minimal JS (enough to long-poll or similar) -- but only if you could implement the client part of the relay. XMPP would have been an obvious way to do that, but even a documented web protocol would work fine.
>oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ?
Um, TCP connections are totally silent when idle, save for application level heartbeats. And how would you implement a protocol with push notifications without TCP?
It's true that mobile push services exist to save power - they do this by maintaining only one heartbeat, for the most part. But it's not a huge win, and it could be added to XMPP. I don't see how protobufs help this situation at all.
That's not necessarily bad. It just means someone thought that it was more important for the interface to be easy to discover than it was to keep it clean.
In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to.
The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything else.
The most annoying problem with Hangouts is that I have to load the whole Gmail tab for answering a single message on my laptop. This tool is a lot faster. I zoomed to 125%, adblocked the bing background image & the now cropped giant greeting.
Nicer interface, but have they done anything about power consumption? Would like to be able to run a 30 minute hangout without completely draining the battery on my Macbook Pro.
Just wanted to chime in that I strongly dislike the new facelift to hangouts for Android. Loading images in the chat cause it to stutter pretty hard on my Nexus 5.
On Windows 10, still fails to respect both Hangout's own sound settings for speaker/mic as well as the Windows configured default communication device. So while I like this interface better, any number of other services I use (e.g. Zoom, Skype) just work better with my devices. Those other services can switch to using my bluetooth headset on calls and similar.
Google really is a technology company, not a products company. They have some really very clever ideas and implement them with great mediocrity more often than they should. And even when they get something solid, you can never really tell for how long the product will last or if they'll start screwing with it.
For me, the only things that really come to mind as solid are maps and search. Google Now, great... if you don't have a Google Apps account. Inbox, great... if you don't need a bit slightly sophisticated formatting or image support. etc.
Are you using chrome? I ran into the same issue (wouldn't respect audio settings) plus it burned 100% cup on all four cores and the audio kept breaking up.
It turns out that IE 10 is good for something! Not only do the hangout plugin audio settings work but the sound itself works (no more disrupted streams) and cpu hangs out around 50% across 4 cores. Much better!
Yep. Using Chrome. I don't see the high CPU or the audio issues aside from respecting the settings though. Maybe I should give the other browsers a try! Thx!
With gchat I can see who is on an android device, and who is idle (even both). Can't with hangouts, why is that? Why give end users even less information?
There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).