Dear Google,

You rule at search. No one compares. You’re clean, you’re simple, and you’re honest. You’re such a household name that you’ve long been considered a verb. You’ve revolutionized advertising and mastered the cloud. You’ve accomplished so much and are so great in many ways, but like everything in life, there is a ying to your yang. I have been harboring some ill will towards you for awhile now, and there are some things that I need to get off my chest.

It all started when you bought YouTube.

This little love affair between Gmail and YouTube and Google+ and now Google My Business would be a valiant effort of unification…if it worked. Here are some reasons why it doesn’t:

I have to have a Gmail account in order to have a YouTube channel. This is a problem for my clients who don’t use Gmail because it’s yet another inbox to manage. And ultimately, it’s problematic for you too, because these clients aren’t checking their Gmail accounts. They’re not receiving your messages. Would it not be better to let the user register for YouTube and Google+ with the email of their choice, and then lure people in to Gmail by offering them the benefit of being able to easily toggle from inbox to social media to apps?

You don’t make it easy for brands to have a presence. Almost every other social network has figured out that a new user falls into one of two groups: person or business. While it’s true that Facebook brand pages are tied to personal accounts in a sense, you really put the whole concept of a brand signing up for YouTube or Google+ on the back burner. It’s almost as if you’re saying, “Oh, yeah, you can be a brand on Google+, but you’re going to have to figure out how. Oh, and every brand account you create will also create personal human pages you won’t be able to hide.” And with outdated documentation on official support sites with screenshots that don’t match up to the current interface, frustration begins to mount.

I have to create a different Gmail account for every YouTube account I want. It’s annoying to not be able to toggle back and forth and easily select my identity and instead have to resort to my makeshift workaround of having multiple browsers open to toggle between accounts. Forcing users to have multiple email accounts for separate YouTube accounts is both mundane and archaic. You would think you would have learned from Facebook’s usability by now. All someone with multiple pages has to do to change identities is click a drop-down and choose which page they want to be at that given moment.

Somehow in your efforts of consolidation, things are more separate and complex than ever. Because I have two different Gmail accounts in order to have separate YouTube accounts and Google+ pages for two very different sides of my business with different audiences, another issue arises. You automatically create Google+ pages for each email account. So the account I only created in order to be able to have an additional Google+ page for a sister brand auto-generated another personal Google+ page. A page that cannot be hidden or deleted. People are following me on this account that I don’t use.

Duplicates cause frustration. I recently went to add my listing to Google My Business, and went through most of the process before I got to the screen that says it will create a Google+ page for my business. NOOOOOO! I already have a Google+ page for business! Where is my option to select and connect that page? You are assuming I’m starting fresh. If there is a way to verify and edit my listing from my existing Google+ page, it’s deeply buried.

This is a UX intervention.

At the end of the day, it can all be chalked up to counter-intuitiveness. Where are your testers? If you do have a user interface team, then they need to start conducting more focus groups, because it is obvious they are far removed from the user. Or perhaps they need more power and a bigger voice. Please start investing in this group, and I promise your lackluster reputation in these areas will start brightening.