> Typical Google. Sending UX down the drain in a whim

While doesn't seem like their brightest idea I still miss the old whimsy Google.

> Apparently none of their "interviewed to death" workers noticed the potential ways this could backfire

This is IMO the really interesting part but I guess there is a strong groupthink culture there.

I think the old whimsy Google would think adding a minion gif to emails was a completely lazy and boring idea.

Yeah. Making Google Maps for the moon (with cheese at the maximum zoom level) was a combination of interesting and funny in a way that wasn’t absolutely contemptuous of the user

As the company has become a generic conglomerate, its sense of humor has been lost.

“I’m just worried that someone might —”

“Shut up Kris, you’re not being Googley.”

> Apparently none of their "interviewed to death" workers noticed the potential ways this could backfire

I am willing to bet at least one person on the team raised this as an issue before launch at it was ignored or shouted down.

Could be. But that requires strong leadership, because you have to effectively say (probably at a very late stage, like launch review) "this joke is crap and will hurt people, not gonna happen" and burn the work of the team that did it (and I am sure there were at least two people involved here).

That's what should have happened because the nature of an April Fools joke is that it bypasses the pre-testing, canarying, "go back to the drawing board", staged rollouts etc that most features would go through on their way to exposure to hundreds of millions of people. You can't do a 10% rollout on a joke that's meant to last one day.

I think Google should give up on April Fools jokes. Some of them have become so elaborate (like the Maps one last year) that it's obvious they have too many staff and not enough to do.

FWIW, when I worked with the Doodle team, there absolutely were doodles that were canceled the day before they were scheduled to run, either because someone deemed them offensive or they had a critical bug or they just weren't up to Google's quality standards. It sucked for the engineers, and there was usually a postmortem afterwards about how the issue could've been caught earlier, but it happened.

I was also responsible for a bunch of easter eggs, including TLing the [let it snow] one that ran just over the holidays in 2011. We did do staged 10% rollouts. It was usually an abbreviated staged rollout, where we would push to 10% for an hour or two, monitor Twitter for flames, check the logs to make sure all browsers were interacting with it (to catch browser bugs), and listen for an SRE yelling at us, but it was there.

Didn't work on GMail nor on any of the April Fools jokes, and I haven't been there for close to 2 years now, but that was my experience on Search & Doodles.

Yeah, my impression is that the web search people have much more strong and defensive product people than Gmail, who are more willing to say no.

Say what you want about this prank, but Google Maps Pac Man was fantastic!

perhaps it was obvious to everyone already, but i'm more and more beginning to feel that the company should place higher cultural value in UX, other than just quality programming