Almost a year ago, Google made an apparently small change to Google Calendar. They started automatically adding Google Hangout video links to every new appointment. And it was bad.
I’m sure you’ve all seen appointments like this pop up in your calendar. How do you join the meeting? Do you dial the phone number, or do you click on the ‘Join meeting’ link? Personally, I always assume that if someone has manually entered a phone number or an address, then that supersedes Google’s annoying attempt to ‘help.’ And, usually, I’m right. But there’s always someone who clicks the link instead. In this particular case, two of us dialled the phone number, and four or five clicked the link. Why, I shall never know…
How anyone at Google ever assumed that this wilful attempt to confuse could be considered good, useful, helpful, or even vaguely smart is beyond me. It’s a user experience nightmare, and it’s wholly unnecessary.
I understand why Google might want to encourage us to use Hangouts. That’s fine. I do use Hangouts. Sometimes they’re exactly the right tool for the job. But this is a calendar. We organise physical events in it. We organise phone calls and skype calls in it. Only a subset of those things are even vaguely appropriate for a Google Hangout. Google’s a smart company. It could probably read the ‘Where’ field, spot an address or a phone number, and automatically remove it’s “helpful” video call link. That wouldn’t be so hard. An intern could probably do it, before their first flat white.
Meeting organisers can, of course, manually remove the ‘Join meeting’ link when they create the event in the first place. If they do it in Google Calendar itself, and if they remember to click through to the appointment’s detail page… I always do, if I’m on a computer.
But, a lot of the time, I’m on a mobile device. I’m using Apple’s Calendar app, or Sunrise, or Outlook. And they provide no access at all to the magical ‘Remove’ link. Indeed, they say nothing at all about the video call associated with the appointment you just created.
But then, as soon as you or any of the meeting participants move to Google Calendar on the web, the sneaky video call link makes itself known. Confusion ensues, once more, but now even worse because the event creator has absolutely no idea what video call everyone else is talking about.
We could have a long and involved discussion about the various ways in which Google positions Google Calendar. We could talk about its role in promoting other Google services (like Hangouts). We could talk about its role as a valuable component in a sea of loosely coupled services (like Sunrise, or Outlook, or whatever). We could deploy business theory and network theory and a whole heap of other things, to explore the inherent tensions at play.
Or we could recognise this for what it is. Asinine. Stupid. Unusable. A pain in the…
You’ve had your fun, Google. Now fix it.
And why, you may ask, am I writing about this now? It’s been there (and been annoying or confusing everyone) for 12 months. This. UberConference, a useful phone conferencing service which I also use, has added the ability to provide reasonably intelligent links to UberConference calls inside a Google Calendar invite. That’s actually pretty useful. And, importantly, it’s initiated by the event creator, not inserted automagically by some all-knowing (but really, in this case, pretty stupid) machine.
But look closely. What’s hiding under the UberConference link in this screen shot from their blog post?
(source: Switch Communications)
Oh, imagine the further scope for confusion… {sigh}
