Sometimes one wonders if giant companies like Google ever think about their end users when they redesign their properties. One such case is Google's recent redesign of their financial site, Google Finance.
There are plenty of sites around for people to track their stock portfolios, real or imaginary. But if you are a Google user and interested in stocks, chances are you have been using Google Finance to keep tabs on the market.
Google Finance had never been a particularly rich site in terms of data and information. They have been dismal at covering earnings data, options prices, analysts ratings, and much more. But one area they were decent at was the homepage where one could get a quick glimpse of his/her custom stock portfolio, local and international market indices, currencies, interest rates, and some commodities such as gold and oil.
That is no longer. A few months ago Google started to push users to their new and updated finance site. The old site was still available via an unpublished link but then a few weeks ago the link went offline and now everyone is forced to use the new site.
So what's wrong with the new site? Design-wise it is more polished and modern than the old one and at the same time it is virtually useless, it simply sucks. What Google failed to understand is that most people interested in the markets want to see as much data crammed into as little space as possible and as timely as possible.
Instead it appears that Google threw a bunch of design-snob interns together with the latest web development tools (AngularJS, no doubt) to create a modern and responsive finance site. There are tons of white spaces, no charts, no indices, no commodities, and only a couple of stocks shown from the portfolio on the homepage.
Well, this strategy has backfired and I am far from the only one complaining. Google's own search box suggestions bear witness to that, not to mention #Googlefinance.

Google Search Box
As for me I opted to escape from the hideous new design to Yahoo Finance. Yahoo pages are sometimes burdened with ads and other nonsense, but at least their portfolio page is leaps and bounds ahead of the Google Finance's so-called modern/responsive design. Now that I have my custom portfolio on Yahoo there's little chance of going back to Google Finance, even if they did bring back the classic site.

Classic Google Finance

New Google Finance