R.I.P. Google Hangouts — Chrome App

I’d love to see docking the Chat Bar and Conversations added into the new Hangouts.

This past Thursday, while at work, I received a notification in the Hangouts chrome extension to upgrade to the new app. Apparently all users are being opted into this by October 17th. How exciting! Naturally, I spontaneously hit the upgrade button and 3 minutes later was very disappointed.

Google suppressed a key competitive advantage Hangouts had—its desktop app’s unique integrated user experience — and decided to pursue the design of every other desktop chat app.

Before, you could dock the chat bar and conversations at the bottom of your desktop screen. The bar was always persistent but minimized/maximized as desired. Thus, this allowed you do glide between work and communication with team mates, (or send inappropriate messages to your friends during the work day without your deskmate looking over).

Before

After

Hangouts After Upgrade

Now, Hangouts is simply another webview like Slack, WhatsApp, or any other desktop chat messaging app that you have to navigate to or manually minimize/maximize.

Slack

WhatsApp

The reason to unify Hangouts with Google’s Material design language and Polymer framework is logical from a design consistency perspective. If Hangouts follows the same technical and design architecture as the rest of Google’s products, it is easier to support existing and new features, and users can draw more straightforward parallels between product mechanics. However, unification for the sake of standardization alone lacks a broader user experience perspective. Hangouts’ ability to aggregate all gChat and texts across device types is phenomenally useful, and for the sake of a streamlined experience on desktop, I’d love to see docking the Chat Bar and Conversations added into the new Hangouts,

(On the bright side, this update hopefully fixes some of the contact sync issues Hangouts has had with contacts.google.com.)