Comment by cbhl
7 years ago
That ship has already sailed.
Google redesigned all their desktop UIs to work with touchscreens in 2012, at the expense of mouse-and-keyboard users. Microsoft's Ribbon UI for Office, and Fluent UI for Windows 10 were both designed for touch first. Hell, even Ubuntu's Unity made huge compromises on Desktop in the name of convergence, even though no significant fraction of users ended up running Ubuntu on phones.
The original designer vision was for UI to adjust depending on the form factor of the user's device. What we got instead is "upscaled phone UIs everywhere", because programmers like to be DRY and reuse code. This is literally the tree swing cartoon.
"Touch first" seems to invariably mean "terrible to use on a desktop".
The design constraints of the "input devices" are invariably different. The keyboard and mouse are "precise", while fingers are not. This manifests itself exactly like you see it :(
Just as an aside, almost all Google apps have at least a serviceable keyboard control layer that you can find by pressing '?'. This has helped my productivity using say Gmail tremendously.