8 ms·

GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

251 points by centro 14y ago

abcd_f 14y ago
There's nothing wrong with minimalism. Minimalism is about making things simple, but knowing when to stop.
- afhof 14y ago
  Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
- noblethrasher 14y ago
  Or as Alfred Whitehead said: "Seek simplicity and distrust it"
howardr 14y ago
many of these issues can changed to be more old-gmail-like http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/ http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-... 1) remove important markers 2) add labels to actions/buttons
- afhof 14y ago
  Sure, you could change it back to the old way, but should you have to? I think this is a good question to ask whenever some bothersome thing happens such as a poor redesign. You /could/ fix it, but should you have to?
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail-interface.html http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail-interface.htm... Even closer revert-to-old via the Stylish plugin and CSS hacks.
gringomorcego 14y ago
On an unrelated note: I noticed people always complained about GMail having bad service (like me, when I couldn't open particular pieces of mail for a few days at a time). How do these problems change when we become paying customers of Google? When I get a Google drive, do I get help in fixing problems? Or is that a lie I want to believe in?
- TeHCrAzY 14y ago
  You get proper email support if you are paying for gapps for domains. I don't know if that's what you mean by paying for gmail.
freditup 14y ago
I always have though GMail is subpar at best when it comes to interface. I feel no desire to justify this opinion, just my personal feelings.
- pirateking 14y ago
  Same here. I have always preferred native mail clients (originally Thunderbird, and now Mail.app on OS X/iOS).
- dasil003 14y ago
  Did you ever learn the keyboard shortcuts? Why I love Gmail is combining 80% of the power of CLI mail clients like mutt with 80% of the visual presentation of native clients. I process hundreds of emails a day, and that's on top of the coding work I'm expected to do. Being able to work through them with vi-style keyboard shortcuts for everything including rapid labeling is the killer feature that nothing else comes close to.
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
There's something deeper going on here: The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements being hidden or tucked away behind several clicks for the sake of "minimalism", incorrectly correlating a sterile white page with "simplicity". And they won't stop until the whole page is white and empty with one button and a line of text. These designers are doing whatever makes them look off the wall bat-shit-creative (of the Lady Gaga variety). Many of these designers have stopped caring about a/b tests and the users and are focusing their designs solely on how it makes them look to the community. They want to be the next Steve Jobs, now that he has passed. And they are going to mimic his arrogance, take his risks, and think it will get them to his level. It will not, it's just pissing us off. On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. Explaining to the average person why the new gmail UI is abnoxious is like explaining to the average person what's wrong with Michael Bay's films.
- josephcooney 14y ago
  Sound similar to the "designing for the industry, not people" syndrome seen in the world of architecture discussed here: http://www.shareable.net/blog/architectural-myopia-designing-for-industry-not-people http://www.shareable.net/blog/architectural-myopia-designing...
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  >These designers are doing whatever makes them look I doubt Google would let a group of self interested ego fueled creative's override rational principal and analysis. Especially considering this is a flagship Google product with 350M users. >On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. I'm a designer. I've never properly critically analysed the new Gmail design. But I haven't felt the need to. For me it just functions really well.
macspoofing 14y ago
I agree with #3. I have a lot of problems deciphering the icons, in the browser client and the ipad client.
- highwind81 14y ago
  They added a setting to change the icons to text: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-buttons-replace-icons.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-bu...
- jcc80 14y ago
  You could also use Gmelius to use icons and text plus lots of other options like removing ads. I'm enjoying so far. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dheionainndbbpoacpnopgmnihkcmnkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dheionainndbbpoacp...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chintan 14y ago
This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors They completely REVERSED it!! Previously: Blue - No new message Orange - New chat message Now: Blue - New chat message Black - No new message Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.
- ntkachov 14y ago
  On the topic of bad colors, I like facebook's old colors of "offline" and "online": A green circle for online. a Gray-green circle for offline. On a screen with bad gamma, they looked almost exactly the same.
mthreat 14y ago
I totally agree with you. Another specific change that is hard to defend is the new "..." three dots to expand hidden parts of the conversation from previous messages. It used to be text that was clear and large enough to click on. Apparently the Gmail team hasn't learned about Fitts' Law, and the new target is pretty hard to hit with a mouse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
- binxbolling 14y ago
  That trimming is extremely poor as well -- doesn't just clip parts of the conversation from previous messages, but parts of my current message! It drives me up the wall. I have had it trim my entire e-mail, then have to awkwardly explain to the recipient that they should click those three dots to see what I'd written. It's insanity, and when I called Google tech support about it... oh wait, LOLsupport.
- Zarel 14y ago
  Fitt's law is useful for two insights: The obvious one is that things you want to be easy to click should be large/close, but the less obvious one is that things you don't want to be easy to click should be small/far. The "..." dots is probably an example of the latter - I'd guess that Google wants people to view entire conversations by expanding the conversation view, not by clicking "...", so they make one way much easier than the other.
twoodfin 14y ago
I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  I've also found the "important" filtering very useful. It's fairly rare now that I get an email that really matters and is not marked "important". I think that it takes a while for it to figure out my patterns (yay for machine learning), but after that it works great. I bet most people just weren't patient enough to train it properly. (Of course some may just have more complicated ideas of what an important message is than me.)
- kluge 14y ago
  The best part of it is having Gmail on Android notify you only about important messages. It's great to get notifications about emails from friends about things going on tonight, but not get bothered by email list messages that can wait.
ilamont 14y ago
Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz"). (I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)
- freditup 14y ago
  Eh, I think Yahoo Mail was upgraded a year or so ago. I prefer it to GMail.
- muyuu 14y ago
  Has effing tabs so you can have a "compose" tab open and reach your email for info to copy-paste in your message. Something as basic as this is missing in gmail's default interface. Having to save and go back to drafts is cumbersome, as are other work-arounds.
  - thezilch 14y ago
    Pop the compose into a new window and/or tab? The assumption is probably that tabs and windows are built into your browser, why build another layer of tabs?
    - muyuu 14y ago
      This is not the default behaviour. Popping it out will send you to the main page, having two full email tabs and no good clue about which is which. It's worse than Yahoo's way, or the basic html interface in gmail.
jdietrich 14y ago
It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width. Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster. Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be very reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.
- mortenjorck 14y ago
  You're probably thinking of Doug Bowman's classic "Goodbye Google" post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html I think two things are entirely possible here: One, that in reaction to Bowman's high-profile indictment of Google's design culture, there has been a shift over the past few years toward Apple-like, auteur-driven design at Google, that was misapplied in this case, or (I think more likely), every detail of the new Gmail UI was extensively tested by itself, but there was no final arbiter to say "you know what? This one part sucks; let's change it despite the data."
  - furyofantares 14y ago
    So you think the possibilities are that either google ignored the data or the data is wrong with no affordance to the possibility that you are wrong?
    - eridius 14y ago
      A third option is they tested each individual change in isolation, and then grabbed all of the high-performing changes and lumped them together. Just because the individual changes may have been improvements within the context of the old UI doesn't mean they're still good once put together with all the other changes. That said, I have trouble believing that changing the buttons from labels to icons could have possibly tested as an improvement. I'm with the OP; I have to mouse over every button and read the tooltip to find the Report Spam one.
aresant 14y ago
I overwhelmingly agree as a UX guy w/the comments in this thread about the poor choices from a design perspective. But since this new design rolled into beta I've found myself slowly depending on Gmail more and more vs. my desktop client. I don't know why but the "lack" of proper interface design here makes it feel blazing FAST to me, which is really the #1 thing I care about when trying to keep up with a slew of email. I never had that sense in the previous version. Anybody else?
- DavidAbrams 14y ago
  Nope. The asinine hiding of most of your mail folders makes it way slower to navigate. And there's no indication that they exist. No control with which to reveal them. This regression in UI standards that evolved and stayed in place for decades reveals that there aren't enough decent designers to do the required work today. And they don't have even a moderate level of experience or common sense, or they wouldn't make such glaring errors.
  - nchlswu 14y ago
    I hobble through that feature so often. You'd think a team that dogfoods this stuff would want to fix it. That being said, I know the feeling the parent is talking about, but I never got that feeling with Gmail. It was something that worked and that's what I appreciated about it.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    Click on the little arrow next to your folder/label. Under the 'In label list:' part, select 'Show'. Now your folders appear all the time. Also, you can click the "More" at the bottom to expand it. Why is that so hard? EDIT: No really - why is it so hard? Better than 90% of the complaining on this page could be solved just by spending a few minutes going through settings, tweaking GMail to your liking. There's even a settings page where you can see all of your labels in one place, and set each folder to show/hide/show if unread. It's specifically designed for the parent's use case, and yet he pretends that it doesn't exist.
    - 14y ago
DLarsen 14y ago
I have no problem with the new Gmail. After the initial adjustment period, I find myself enjoying it more than the old version. I have developed a reflex for using the buttons that didn't exist with the text versions. It just happened.
wololo 14y ago
brilliant hack to re-enable reverting to the old gmail UI: http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerjk.com$2Frevert-gmail http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerj...
- ranit8 14y ago
  It works! I love you.
wmeredith 14y ago
Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  Don't shoot the messenger - Who cares if his site is not easy to read? It's all about the message. He does not pretend to be a UI designer or something.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    Because maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Personally having used the old Gmail interface and the new Gmail interface extensively, I think the criticisms do mostly boil down to change aversion. Just to take one point: the icons are confusing at first, but mail is something you daily for years, and Gmail has always been optimized for power users, so even though it might take you a week or two to get used to the icons, it's a benefit because now a greater percentage of the words on the screen are actually your email content.
- luser001 14y ago
  What did you find hard to read about the site? I was able to read it just fine. (just double-checked). Nice big text with high, but not too high, contrast. What's not to like?
  - pedrogrande 14y ago
    I'm sorry but the text is tiny! It looks no bigger than 8px. Are you reading it on a mobile device perhaps?
    - luser001 14y ago
      Yes, I see the small text now. :) Looks like firefox remembered the text-zoom setting i must have set for some other subdomain of wordpress.com. To be fair to the blogger, he probably is also a victim here: he's probably reusing a theme (edit: yep, scroll to the bottom) whose designer committed the tiny-text idiocy. At least he didn't do low contrast and tiny text like most other sites do (e.g., posterous). :)
wavesplash 14y ago
I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes. In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme: http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic-blue-theme http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic... Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing: http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/ http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  I have no issue with the new design. But I think this is a fair criticism considering how polarising the change has been.
- e_proxus 14y ago
  This user style puts the text back on the buttons: http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons-to-text http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons...
  - suboptical 14y ago
    There's an option in general settings to add text button labels.
- d5tryr 14y ago
  All or nothing? They gave users an entire year to transition!
rogerbinns 14y ago
I've long solved the Gmail web interface issues by accessing it only via IMAP. On the rare occasions when I have to use the website or Android Gmail clients they seem so unproductive to me. I think it is an information density thing - my desktop client (Thunderbird these days) is able to do a far better job of showing me more information at once. It also has the ability to manage state a lot better than web apps so my different panes can have differing contexts.
mellis 14y ago
Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?
zmmmmm 14y ago
When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. This is one way I know that I'm a mediocre designer. Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well. I feel like Google has suffered from a similar problem - the solution to every UI problem these days is minimalism. Remove borders, accents, highlights, colors. On the surface it looks clean and simple but scratch beneath that and it seems to have no soul and no reason to exist. I think the same issue goes directly to functional aspects as well - the functions and features on the page should feel alive as if they are speaking to me. I should be attracted to them, immersed in them, like they've been incorporated as parts of myself - but I'm not - I can barely differentiate them from the inactive, static parts of the page. Most of Google these days feels like I am filling out an IRS tax form. At best it is boring, at worst it is aggravating. I'm looking forward to when we get through this new style of design from Google.
- theoj 14y ago
  >> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. Interesting observation... this is something I struggled with as well coming from a coding background and trying to do design -- at the individual element level the colors seemed great, but pulling back to the larger picture everything looked washed out. Did you ever come up with a solution for this?
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    The solution is to find one or two contrast colors that you use sparingly. you would be surprised how much an icon or some text or a couple of elements in a contrasting color will make your design pop into life. Think about it (loosly) the way you think about inheritance in OOP. What is the parent, what are the ancestors. All elements on pages have a priority. That priority should be the guide of your visual heiarchy. This can be done with size alone but it can also be done with color. Also black or almost black (#222-#333) as copy is always a good way to make sure your page has contrast. But again it depends on what you are doing. I really need to finish my book on design for developers. I think I have found a way to create the bridge between being a developer and a designer. When I get to new york I will have more time.
eblume 14y ago
Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.
jcastro 14y ago
I feel completely opposite, if anything I think gmail should go back to being simpler and more minimalist instead of more complicated.
jrockway 14y ago
I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.
- initself 14y ago
  I use it without problems too, and so does the author, but our eyes are not happy and our brains are less relaxed. We never used importance and we don't want it cluttering up our stars. We need visual queues, like lines.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    You can turn it off. Under Inbox in Settings.
- DavidAbrams 14y ago
  Well, I thought the old design sucked, so I welcomed change. Guess what? The new design sucks far more.
- nchlswu 14y ago
  the fundamental problem I have with the redesign is the fact that it introduced usability problems that weren't there before. I'll admit the redesign may have solved other ones, I admittedly didn't notice them at the time. The three points the author pointed out are some glaring usability issues that can be a problem for a big chunk of people. Just because you or I can use it without a hitch doesn't mean its a great design.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  It's certainly possible that this is the reason, but I agree with the author that it's arrogance to assume that disliking a change can always be attributed to change aversion.
msluyter 14y ago
I hate the new themes. My question is: why couldn't they have provided themes that at least look similar to the old ones? I tried most of the available themes and there only one that I find vaguely satisfactory is the high contrast theme. Some of them, like "Wood" are laughable -- is this an old Myspace page I'm seeing? And better yet, you'd think a company with Google's talent pool could make the themes configurable at a more granular level. Thanks, Google, for making me contemplate abandoning gmail for the first time. (I know, I know... it's free, right? So what right do I have to complain? I guess I'm mostly angry at myself for growing so dependent on it (and recommending it to my friends/family.))
drucken 14y ago
I, like the author, abhor the new GMail interface. Thankfully, I found a workaround, explained at bottom. In fact, I found it difficult to explain to my parents how to navigate the new interface. They were quite upset at the changes and were considering about how to revert to their old providers (thankfully, I set up an email forwarding domain for them years ago so they can change any time they wish). It really is that appalling! The contrast in usability to almost any other web mail service is shocking. Check Hotmail or Fastmail.fm or even Yahoo mail and "feel" the difference yourself! Workaround to GMail's new interface: 0. Make sure you have a browser or plugin that supports site-selective scripting, e.g. NoScript. 1. Disable scripting for google.com Then when you login, GMail offers a "basic html" interface. This is amazingly straightforward, fast, everything clearly delineated with strong colors, all new information extremely obvious, and just the basic design that matches closely to the old design. If Google manage to mess up even this basic interface, then I guess, I and my family will have to find alternatives, e.g. switching to mail clients or for those who travel a lot to Hotmail.
jsherry 14y ago
"I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily." You can remove the importance markers: Settings > Inbox tab > Importance Markers.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- iaskwhy 14y ago
  And there is also a setting for having text labels in buttons instead of icons.
robomartin 14y ago
I have been using Yahoo Mail for a number of years. I find the interface to be far superior to that of GMail. More usable and practical. In many ways it mimics Outlook. They have some nice drag-and-drop action, right click menu tools and, my favorite, an Outlook-like reading pane. Last time I touched GMail it felt clunky. Because of this I have never felt compelled to use it.
gorloth 14y ago
The thing that drives me crazy with the new design is the separate scrolling areas, when I use the mouse wheel or hit the up/down arrow keys I want the entire thing to scroll, not whatever chunk I happen to my mouse in. This is especially annoying as I have a low res screen (old computers) and thus I can't much of any of the chat list, I used to just be able to scroll down to see it. I wish knew CSS magics to try and fix it with stylish or something (I'm a c programmer all the way)
anthonyb 14y ago
All of the things that he's complaining about are changeable in settings. And not even buried three levels deep -- they're right on the first settings page! 1. Pick a different theme. I have one with a blue background, not the default light/white one. 2. Go into the general settings, and change your star to a different colour, ie. enable the red, or blue one, or the green checkbox. Now they stand out. 3. Go into the general settings. Change the 'Button Labels' radio from 'Icons' to 'Text'. If you're going to bag someone's interface, you should at least spend some time figuring out how you can change it...
- mthreat 14y ago
  Thanks, changing the labels to text is a big help. I didn't even notice it there in General settings. It still doesn't change the tiny "..." link to a text label (the thing you click on in a message to show previous messages in the conversation). See my other comment here about Fitts' Law.
  - thezilch 14y ago
    While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?
    - mthreat 14y ago
      I use it all the time. I've found that clicking on the previous messages in the conversation view is much slower (requires hitting their servers, which are usually slow). But clicking on the "..." must not require a server hit, because it's instant.
      - anthonyb 14y ago
        I don't find it that slow - but you can hit 'expand all' in the top right (next to the printer icon) to download the whole thread at once.
paul 14y ago
Well at least there's a giant red COMPOSE button, because every time I see a giant red button, I think COMPOSE! I'm hoping that they'll do another revision soon to make it look more like the recently updated G+ design, which actually puts some visual separation between content and navigation (and also doesn't have giant red buttons).
- anthonyb 14y ago
  There isn't on my GMail, because I figured out how to change the theme...
  - paul 14y ago
    As did I, but the defaults shouldn't be awful.
    - anthonyb 14y ago
      Who says they're awful? You just don't like them. Fair enough that you don't, but putting your opinion forward as fact (like most of the people here and the OP) doesn't really advance the argument. Perhaps a lot of people have trouble finding the compose button on first use?
      - pbiggar 14y ago
        > Who says they're awful? You just don't like them. Well yes, but he is the guy who wrote Gmail, and that does add a little bit of strength to his argument.
        anthonyb 14y ago
        It shouldn't be a free pass though ;) "A big red button is awful." isn't much good compared to "A big red button is awful because ..." or "Instead of a big red button you should do ..."
        14y ago
pedrogrande 14y ago
Personally, I love the new GMail interface and have been using it for months. I like that is less cluttered and that I can more easily configure what is displayed. I've changed the buttons to be text in the settings as I did find the icons hard to pick at a glance. I also love the new themes. It's interesting to me to see so many people grumble at interface changes whether it's Facebook or Gmail.
- BlackNapoleon 14y ago
  Same...
bane 14y ago
As much as a I dislike the new Gmail design, I'm fine with it, why? I almost never use the Gmail site. I'm either getting my mail with Thunderbird or my tablet or phone. I almost never have a reason to do otherwise.
nkurz 14y ago
I'm in the same boat, and think the usability of the new interface is terrible. And the pretentiousness of the "form over function" design still makes me gag. But Chrome plugins like "Minimalist for Everything" make it almost bearable. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde... This and similar tools let hide and modify GMail with custom CSS and Javascript. Instead of trying to convince Google to behave rationally, it's easier to try to warp the new interface into something usable. I think about half the things in the article are already covered. If only I could figure out a way to get the "stars" on the same side in the message view as on the overview...
njharman 14y ago
Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste. To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.
- pirateking 14y ago
  Great analogy between a designer's idea of "taste", and the engineers equivalent "elegance". To take it further, just as the shortest code isn't always the best, the most minimal design is also not best by default.
njharman 14y ago
Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste. To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.
andymangold 14y ago
Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who don't understand design abusing style and visual trends. The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.
twelvechairs 14y ago
One of the main problems why the 'clean design' has not actually benefitted users is because of gmails feature creep. Where once I could just write and recieve mail, now, by default, I have 'stars', 'circles', 'importance markers', '+ share', 'notifications', 'gadgets'... etc. all confusing my view of my mail. Most users don't want any of these things, and they certainly don't want to have to spend mental energy realising they dont want them, then hunting around in settings menus to see if you can actually turn them off... There are some good design additions in the revised gmail too, but IMHO the above is really what makes gmail feel much more cluttered and cumbersome than it was before....
halayli 14y ago
Forcing users to relearn an interface without providing any added value makes no sense. I ended up moving to Mail.app (which isn't perfect) because of the hideous in-page scrolling forced on me in the new Gmail interface. Desktop experience is unbeatable; snappier interface, better performance, wider access to system resources, better integration with the OS, and you don't have to rely on the browser to be open all the time. I find this advantageous especially when composing emails.
teflonhook 14y ago
The new UI SUCKS!!!!
KaeseEs 14y ago
I'm incredulous that one of the goals of the redesign was to make more powerful themes. New-style themes are much, much less powerful than the old-style themes - cf. the new Terminal theme, which can't even change the text color or font, but is rather a hollow shell of itself with a small gif of a blinking green cursor in the upper left corner the only remnant of its old self. A preview of the old page in my Opera speed dial is all that remains of my old green-on-black monospace friend; I have set it to never update. Incidentally, the new UI for video calls makes the 'end' button the same color as the background, and it is very difficult to see.
deleted 14y ago
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theootz 14y ago
Pretty horrible list IMO... 1) Try a different theme, it may help if it really affects you that much. But this is the only one I somewhat agree with as being possibly an issue; but nothing I really thought of when first looking at the new UI 2) The marker is more than far enough away to make it easy to scan through IMO. This feels far too subjective to just throw out and be like "yea this is definitely a bad change" without doing some testing first. Either way, you can disable this from settings. (Disable snippets iirc?) 3) This too can be disabled: go to settings and change it to text labels instead of graphical labels? As much as I used to hate the new look too, I think it's improved enough since its first iteration to get out of the way and let me do my thing. Though, I still REALLY hate the fact that you can't click on the "Google" logo at the top left to go back to the main page for whatever application you happen to be at. I have no idea why they would remove that...
drostie 14y ago
> I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody > could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it > because it was unfamiliar. It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar belongs to this tab. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing. I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is not the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those cannot be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.
lani 14y ago
thank gawd - someone needed to say that . we're all helpless with google's arm-twisting us to accept the new email-look, or going back, forcing youtube users to start using a gmail id ..
adrianhoward 14y ago
Now, personally speaking, I don't like a bunch of the changes (those damn icons being the most annoying - and yes I know you can change them to text and I have :-). I can certainly criticise some stuff that gets in the way of my personal workflow. But hey - I'm not the 'average' GMail user. Expecting Google for optimise for me is daft. A couple of random thoughts from usability tests I've done over the years: * People are treating the changes to gmail in isolation. Google has changed and integrated design over all of their products. Some parts of a system can get "worse", but still help the overall system get "better". I've seen this when we culled some specialised hi-density layouts on a particular part of a larger system that pissed off some expert users who spent all their time there - but opened up the functionality to be used by a much larger population who were more familiar with the "normal" look. * People don't know what Google is optimising for. Usability and usability testing isn't necessarily about "making things nice for the user". It's about meeting the business goal. For example I've seen users hate the fact we took some layout and colour preferences away from them, despite the fact that overall satisfaction went up, and efficiency increased even for the users who hated the change. * I 100% guarantee that the people commenting here are not "normal" as far as Google is concerned. Does it matter if the geeks like me hate that they can see less e-mail at a time, if the other 99% of the market is jumping for joy that they're not repeatedly clicking on the wrong e-mail? Sometimes you just can't make everybody happy - so have to make a decision over which audience you want to be happy. You will generally have a more successful product if 60% of your audience goes "yay" rather than 100% going "meh". * I spend a bunch of my time talking to "normal" users. I've noticed the general reaction to the new GMail be very different from the general reaction here. They either liked it, or just not noticed/expressed an opinion. I suspect Google cares about that user group more than it does me :-) Also, and this is complete guesswork on my part, this feels like a first stage to me. Currently the various apps are very lightly integrated with a mostly pure visual design makeover. I wouldn't be surprised to see more functional integration appear over the next year or two as more people perceive the various Google apps and systems as an integral "thing".
rubynerd 14y ago
What I don't like is colour as a premium feature, you pay with your social profile
barcoder 14y ago
What I hate most is that when typing an email it is contained in a fixed size box. I can't fill my screen with my email, I have to scroll inside the box to move up and down.
bceagle 14y ago
I just don't get this article from the sense that I have used GMail as my primary email client for the past 5 years and I their redesign didn't affect me at all. The things this author talks about seem to be more of personal preferences than actual objective thought. There has only been one thing that has ever really bugged me about GMail and it has nothing to do with the visual design. I don't like how they treat Folders and Tags as sort of the same thing. In my mind, they are two separate things. I want to organize my mail into folders, but I also want to tag them with keywords that have cross-cutting concerns (ex. folders Work or Home, but tags like Expenses that could be on emails in both folders). Now, I understand that what I am talking about is sort of a personal preferences as well, but I guess my point is that I would care more about changes to functionality in GMail than small, minor visual changes like the ones this author describes. I sort of agree with their mentality that people eventually figure out the new UI and then it is no longer an issue.
spinchange 14y ago
My wife and I think they are optimizing for women. No empirical basis for this, it just seems like every one is aping UI elements and styles from Pinterest these days.
mrweasel 14y ago
The part I find interesting is that whole "minimalism" part. Simply removing stuff or add icons in favor of text buttons have nothing to do with minimalism necessarily. I don't claim to be a minimalism expert, but more often than not people who talk about minimalism seems to think it's either cleaning up your house or removing stuff that "People don't really need", without figuring about what the basic needs actually are. Removing all door handles from your house doesn't make it a minimalist home.
andypants 14y ago
The new icons remind me of visual studio's new redesign. Monochrome icons, no text. Ugh, horrible to use.
saturdaysaint 14y ago
Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble. I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).
jetz 14y ago
Actually they don't have much choices on dropping some specific email features to make UI better. Anyways I think it's just like MS Metro. One cannot say OMG this is cool as we say with Apple properties but people continue to use those (inferior) UIs.
nollidge 14y ago
Please, for the love of Loki, can we all stop equating our subjective opinions with objective truth? Your tastes are different than others. That doesn't make them "arrogant" - at least, not necessarily.
ditojim 14y ago
change is good in general. this change to gmail's interface is good in general. all 3 points in the article can be adjusted by changing a user setting.
emehrkay 14y ago
So no mention of the font size of this blog's content? The comments are larger than the content
d5tryr 14y ago
I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone: Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan. On your first point though you are simply wrong. The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter. The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface. The same is true for coloured backgrounds. If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity. This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode. Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do. I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.
billmcneale 14y ago
It's spelled "Gmail", lowercase 'm'. Source: the Gmail blog, http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/ http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

251 points by centro 14y ago

abcd_f 14y ago

There's nothing wrong with minimalism. Minimalism is about making things simple, but knowing when to stop.

afhof 14y ago
Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
noblethrasher 14y ago
Or as Alfred Whitehead said: "Seek simplicity and distrust it"

howardr 14y ago

many of these issues can changed to be more old-gmail-like http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/ http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-... 1) remove important markers 2) add labels to actions/buttons

afhof 14y ago
Sure, you could change it back to the old way, but should you have to? I think this is a good question to ask whenever some bothersome thing happens such as a poor redesign. You /could/ fix it, but should you have to?
dredmorbius 14y ago
http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail-interface.html http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail-interface.htm... Even closer revert-to-old via the Stylish plugin and CSS hacks.

gringomorcego 14y ago

On an unrelated note: I noticed people always complained about GMail having bad service (like me, when I couldn't open particular pieces of mail for a few days at a time). How do these problems change when we become paying customers of Google? When I get a Google drive, do I get help in fixing problems? Or is that a lie I want to believe in?

TeHCrAzY 14y ago
You get proper email support if you are paying for gapps for domains. I don't know if that's what you mean by paying for gmail.

freditup 14y ago

I always have though GMail is subpar at best when it comes to interface. I feel no desire to justify this opinion, just my personal feelings.

pirateking 14y ago
Same here. I have always preferred native mail clients (originally Thunderbird, and now Mail.app on OS X/iOS).
dasil003 14y ago
Did you ever learn the keyboard shortcuts? Why I love Gmail is combining 80% of the power of CLI mail clients like mutt with 80% of the visual presentation of native clients. I process hundreds of emails a day, and that's on top of the coding work I'm expected to do. Being able to work through them with vi-style keyboard shortcuts for everything including rapid labeling is the killer feature that nothing else comes close to.

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

There's something deeper going on here: The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements being hidden or tucked away behind several clicks for the sake of "minimalism", incorrectly correlating a sterile white page with "simplicity". And they won't stop until the whole page is white and empty with one button and a line of text. These designers are doing whatever makes them look off the wall bat-shit-creative (of the Lady Gaga variety). Many of these designers have stopped caring about a/b tests and the users and are focusing their designs solely on how it makes them look to the community. They want to be the next Steve Jobs, now that he has passed. And they are going to mimic his arrogance, take his risks, and think it will get them to his level. It will not, it's just pissing us off. On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. Explaining to the average person why the new gmail UI is abnoxious is like explaining to the average person what's wrong with Michael Bay's films.

josephcooney 14y ago
Sound similar to the "designing for the industry, not people" syndrome seen in the world of architecture discussed here: http://www.shareable.net/blog/architectural-myopia-designing-for-industry-not-people http://www.shareable.net/blog/architectural-myopia-designing...
andrewfelix 14y ago
>These designers are doing whatever makes them look I doubt Google would let a group of self interested ego fueled creative's override rational principal and analysis. Especially considering this is a flagship Google product with 350M users. >On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. I'm a designer. I've never properly critically analysed the new Gmail design. But I haven't felt the need to. For me it just functions really well.

macspoofing 14y ago

I agree with #3. I have a lot of problems deciphering the icons, in the browser client and the ipad client.

highwind81 14y ago
They added a setting to change the icons to text: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-buttons-replace-icons.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-bu...
jcc80 14y ago
You could also use Gmelius to use icons and text plus lots of other options like removing ads. I'm enjoying so far. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dheionainndbbpoacpnopgmnihkcmnkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dheionainndbbpoacp...

deleted 14y ago

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chintan 14y ago

This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors They completely REVERSED it!! Previously: Blue - No new message Orange - New chat message Now: Blue - New chat message Black - No new message Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.

ntkachov 14y ago
On the topic of bad colors, I like facebook's old colors of "offline" and "online": A green circle for online. a Gray-green circle for offline. On a screen with bad gamma, they looked almost exactly the same.

mthreat 14y ago

I totally agree with you. Another specific change that is hard to defend is the new "..." three dots to expand hidden parts of the conversation from previous messages. It used to be text that was clear and large enough to click on. Apparently the Gmail team hasn't learned about Fitts' Law, and the new target is pretty hard to hit with a mouse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

binxbolling 14y ago
That trimming is extremely poor as well -- doesn't just clip parts of the conversation from previous messages, but parts of my current message! It drives me up the wall. I have had it trim my entire e-mail, then have to awkwardly explain to the recipient that they should click those three dots to see what I'd written. It's insanity, and when I called Google tech support about it... oh wait, LOLsupport.
Zarel 14y ago
Fitt's law is useful for two insights: The obvious one is that things you want to be easy to click should be large/close, but the less obvious one is that things you don't want to be easy to click should be small/far. The "..." dots is probably an example of the latter - I'd guess that Google wants people to view entire conversations by expanding the conversation view, not by clicking "...", so they make one way much easier than the other.

twoodfin 14y ago

I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.

tikhonj 14y ago
I've also found the "important" filtering very useful. It's fairly rare now that I get an email that really matters and is not marked "important". I think that it takes a while for it to figure out my patterns (yay for machine learning), but after that it works great. I bet most people just weren't patient enough to train it properly. (Of course some may just have more complicated ideas of what an important message is than me.)
kluge 14y ago
The best part of it is having Gmail on Android notify you only about important messages. It's great to get notifications about emails from friends about things going on tonight, but not get bothered by email list messages that can wait.

ilamont 14y ago

Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz"). (I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)

freditup 14y ago
Eh, I think Yahoo Mail was upgraded a year or so ago. I prefer it to GMail.
muyuu 14y ago
Has effing tabs so you can have a "compose" tab open and reach your email for info to copy-paste in your message. Something as basic as this is missing in gmail's default interface. Having to save and go back to drafts is cumbersome, as are other work-arounds.
- thezilch 14y ago
  Pop the compose into a new window and/or tab? The assumption is probably that tabs and windows are built into your browser, why build another layer of tabs?
  - muyuu 14y ago
    This is not the default behaviour. Popping it out will send you to the main page, having two full email tabs and no good clue about which is which. It's worse than Yahoo's way, or the basic html interface in gmail.

jdietrich 14y ago

It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width. Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster. Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be very reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.

mortenjorck 14y ago
You're probably thinking of Doug Bowman's classic "Goodbye Google" post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html I think two things are entirely possible here: One, that in reaction to Bowman's high-profile indictment of Google's design culture, there has been a shift over the past few years toward Apple-like, auteur-driven design at Google, that was misapplied in this case, or (I think more likely), every detail of the new Gmail UI was extensively tested by itself, but there was no final arbiter to say "you know what? This one part sucks; let's change it despite the data."
- furyofantares 14y ago
  So you think the possibilities are that either google ignored the data or the data is wrong with no affordance to the possibility that you are wrong?
  - eridius 14y ago
    A third option is they tested each individual change in isolation, and then grabbed all of the high-performing changes and lumped them together. Just because the individual changes may have been improvements within the context of the old UI doesn't mean they're still good once put together with all the other changes. That said, I have trouble believing that changing the buttons from labels to icons could have possibly tested as an improvement. I'm with the OP; I have to mouse over every button and read the tooltip to find the Report Spam one.

aresant 14y ago

I overwhelmingly agree as a UX guy w/the comments in this thread about the poor choices from a design perspective. But since this new design rolled into beta I've found myself slowly depending on Gmail more and more vs. my desktop client. I don't know why but the "lack" of proper interface design here makes it feel blazing FAST to me, which is really the #1 thing I care about when trying to keep up with a slew of email. I never had that sense in the previous version. Anybody else?

DavidAbrams 14y ago
Nope. The asinine hiding of most of your mail folders makes it way slower to navigate. And there's no indication that they exist. No control with which to reveal them. This regression in UI standards that evolved and stayed in place for decades reveals that there aren't enough decent designers to do the required work today. And they don't have even a moderate level of experience or common sense, or they wouldn't make such glaring errors.
- nchlswu 14y ago
  I hobble through that feature so often. You'd think a team that dogfoods this stuff would want to fix it. That being said, I know the feeling the parent is talking about, but I never got that feeling with Gmail. It was something that worked and that's what I appreciated about it.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  Click on the little arrow next to your folder/label. Under the 'In label list:' part, select 'Show'. Now your folders appear all the time. Also, you can click the "More" at the bottom to expand it. Why is that so hard? EDIT: No really - why is it so hard? Better than 90% of the complaining on this page could be solved just by spending a few minutes going through settings, tweaking GMail to your liking. There's even a settings page where you can see all of your labels in one place, and set each folder to show/hide/show if unread. It's specifically designed for the parent's use case, and yet he pretends that it doesn't exist.
  - 14y ago

DLarsen 14y ago

I have no problem with the new Gmail. After the initial adjustment period, I find myself enjoying it more than the old version. I have developed a reflex for using the buttons that didn't exist with the text versions. It just happened.

wololo 14y ago

brilliant hack to re-enable reverting to the old gmail UI: http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerjk.com$2Frevert-gmail http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerj...

ranit8 14y ago
It works! I love you.

wmeredith 14y ago

Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.

ekianjo 14y ago
Don't shoot the messenger - Who cares if his site is not easy to read? It's all about the message. He does not pretend to be a UI designer or something.
- dasil003 14y ago
  Because maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Personally having used the old Gmail interface and the new Gmail interface extensively, I think the criticisms do mostly boil down to change aversion. Just to take one point: the icons are confusing at first, but mail is something you daily for years, and Gmail has always been optimized for power users, so even though it might take you a week or two to get used to the icons, it's a benefit because now a greater percentage of the words on the screen are actually your email content.
luser001 14y ago
What did you find hard to read about the site? I was able to read it just fine. (just double-checked). Nice big text with high, but not too high, contrast. What's not to like?
- pedrogrande 14y ago
  I'm sorry but the text is tiny! It looks no bigger than 8px. Are you reading it on a mobile device perhaps?
  - luser001 14y ago
    Yes, I see the small text now. :) Looks like firefox remembered the text-zoom setting i must have set for some other subdomain of wordpress.com. To be fair to the blogger, he probably is also a victim here: he's probably reusing a theme (edit: yep, scroll to the bottom) whose designer committed the tiny-text idiocy. At least he didn't do low contrast and tiny text like most other sites do (e.g., posterous). :)

wavesplash 14y ago

I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes. In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme: http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic-blue-theme http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic... Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing: http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/ http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...

andrewfelix 14y ago
I have no issue with the new design. But I think this is a fair criticism considering how polarising the change has been.
e_proxus 14y ago
This user style puts the text back on the buttons: http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons-to-text http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons...
- suboptical 14y ago
  There's an option in general settings to add text button labels.
d5tryr 14y ago
All or nothing? They gave users an entire year to transition!

rogerbinns 14y ago

I've long solved the Gmail web interface issues by accessing it only via IMAP. On the rare occasions when I have to use the website or Android Gmail clients they seem so unproductive to me. I think it is an information density thing - my desktop client (Thunderbird these days) is able to do a far better job of showing me more information at once. It also has the ability to manage state a lot better than web apps so my different panes can have differing contexts.

mellis 14y ago

Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?

zmmmmm 14y ago

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. This is one way I know that I'm a mediocre designer. Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well. I feel like Google has suffered from a similar problem - the solution to every UI problem these days is minimalism. Remove borders, accents, highlights, colors. On the surface it looks clean and simple but scratch beneath that and it seems to have no soul and no reason to exist. I think the same issue goes directly to functional aspects as well - the functions and features on the page should feel alive as if they are speaking to me. I should be attracted to them, immersed in them, like they've been incorporated as parts of myself - but I'm not - I can barely differentiate them from the inactive, static parts of the page. Most of Google these days feels like I am filling out an IRS tax form. At best it is boring, at worst it is aggravating. I'm looking forward to when we get through this new style of design from Google.

theoj 14y ago
>> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. Interesting observation... this is something I struggled with as well coming from a coding background and trying to do design -- at the individual element level the colors seemed great, but pulling back to the larger picture everything looked washed out. Did you ever come up with a solution for this?
- ThomPete 14y ago
  The solution is to find one or two contrast colors that you use sparingly. you would be surprised how much an icon or some text or a couple of elements in a contrasting color will make your design pop into life. Think about it (loosly) the way you think about inheritance in OOP. What is the parent, what are the ancestors. All elements on pages have a priority. That priority should be the guide of your visual heiarchy. This can be done with size alone but it can also be done with color. Also black or almost black (#222-#333) as copy is always a good way to make sure your page has contrast. But again it depends on what you are doing. I really need to finish my book on design for developers. I think I have found a way to create the bridge between being a developer and a designer. When I get to new york I will have more time.

eblume 14y ago

Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.

jcastro 14y ago

I feel completely opposite, if anything I think gmail should go back to being simpler and more minimalist instead of more complicated.

jrockway 14y ago

I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.

initself 14y ago
I use it without problems too, and so does the author, but our eyes are not happy and our brains are less relaxed. We never used importance and we don't want it cluttering up our stars. We need visual queues, like lines.
- nollidge 14y ago
  You can turn it off. Under Inbox in Settings.
DavidAbrams 14y ago
Well, I thought the old design sucked, so I welcomed change. Guess what? The new design sucks far more.
nchlswu 14y ago
the fundamental problem I have with the redesign is the fact that it introduced usability problems that weren't there before. I'll admit the redesign may have solved other ones, I admittedly didn't notice them at the time. The three points the author pointed out are some glaring usability issues that can be a problem for a big chunk of people. Just because you or I can use it without a hitch doesn't mean its a great design.
brown9-2 14y ago
It's certainly possible that this is the reason, but I agree with the author that it's arrogance to assume that disliking a change can always be attributed to change aversion.

msluyter 14y ago

I hate the new themes. My question is: why couldn't they have provided themes that at least look similar to the old ones? I tried most of the available themes and there only one that I find vaguely satisfactory is the high contrast theme. Some of them, like "Wood" are laughable -- is this an old Myspace page I'm seeing? And better yet, you'd think a company with Google's talent pool could make the themes configurable at a more granular level. Thanks, Google, for making me contemplate abandoning gmail for the first time. (I know, I know... it's free, right? So what right do I have to complain? I guess I'm mostly angry at myself for growing so dependent on it (and recommending it to my friends/family.))

drucken 14y ago

I, like the author, abhor the new GMail interface. Thankfully, I found a workaround, explained at bottom. In fact, I found it difficult to explain to my parents how to navigate the new interface. They were quite upset at the changes and were considering about how to revert to their old providers (thankfully, I set up an email forwarding domain for them years ago so they can change any time they wish). It really is that appalling! The contrast in usability to almost any other web mail service is shocking. Check Hotmail or Fastmail.fm or even Yahoo mail and "feel" the difference yourself! Workaround to GMail's new interface: 0. Make sure you have a browser or plugin that supports site-selective scripting, e.g. NoScript. 1. Disable scripting for google.com Then when you login, GMail offers a "basic html" interface. This is amazingly straightforward, fast, everything clearly delineated with strong colors, all new information extremely obvious, and just the basic design that matches closely to the old design. If Google manage to mess up even this basic interface, then I guess, I and my family will have to find alternatives, e.g. switching to mail clients or for those who travel a lot to Hotmail.

jsherry 14y ago

"I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily." You can remove the importance markers: Settings > Inbox tab > Importance Markers.

deleted 14y ago
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iaskwhy 14y ago
And there is also a setting for having text labels in buttons instead of icons.

robomartin 14y ago

I have been using Yahoo Mail for a number of years. I find the interface to be far superior to that of GMail. More usable and practical. In many ways it mimics Outlook. They have some nice drag-and-drop action, right click menu tools and, my favorite, an Outlook-like reading pane. Last time I touched GMail it felt clunky. Because of this I have never felt compelled to use it.

gorloth 14y ago

The thing that drives me crazy with the new design is the separate scrolling areas, when I use the mouse wheel or hit the up/down arrow keys I want the entire thing to scroll, not whatever chunk I happen to my mouse in. This is especially annoying as I have a low res screen (old computers) and thus I can't much of any of the chat list, I used to just be able to scroll down to see it. I wish knew CSS magics to try and fix it with stylish or something (I'm a c programmer all the way)

anthonyb 14y ago

All of the things that he's complaining about are changeable in settings. And not even buried three levels deep -- they're right on the first settings page! 1. Pick a different theme. I have one with a blue background, not the default light/white one. 2. Go into the general settings, and change your star to a different colour, ie. enable the red, or blue one, or the green checkbox. Now they stand out. 3. Go into the general settings. Change the 'Button Labels' radio from 'Icons' to 'Text'. If you're going to bag someone's interface, you should at least spend some time figuring out how you can change it...

mthreat 14y ago
Thanks, changing the labels to text is a big help. I didn't even notice it there in General settings. It still doesn't change the tiny "..." link to a text label (the thing you click on in a message to show previous messages in the conversation). See my other comment here about Fitts' Law.
- thezilch 14y ago
  While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?
  - mthreat 14y ago
    I use it all the time. I've found that clicking on the previous messages in the conversation view is much slower (requires hitting their servers, which are usually slow). But clicking on the "..." must not require a server hit, because it's instant.
    - anthonyb 14y ago
      I don't find it that slow - but you can hit 'expand all' in the top right (next to the printer icon) to download the whole thread at once.

paul 14y ago

Well at least there's a giant red COMPOSE button, because every time I see a giant red button, I think COMPOSE! I'm hoping that they'll do another revision soon to make it look more like the recently updated G+ design, which actually puts some visual separation between content and navigation (and also doesn't have giant red buttons).

anthonyb 14y ago
There isn't on my GMail, because I figured out how to change the theme...
- paul 14y ago
  As did I, but the defaults shouldn't be awful.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    Who says they're awful? You just don't like them. Fair enough that you don't, but putting your opinion forward as fact (like most of the people here and the OP) doesn't really advance the argument. Perhaps a lot of people have trouble finding the compose button on first use?
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      > Who says they're awful? You just don't like them. Well yes, but he is the guy who wrote Gmail, and that does add a little bit of strength to his argument.
      - anthonyb 14y ago
        It shouldn't be a free pass though ;) "A big red button is awful." isn't much good compared to "A big red button is awful because ..." or "Instead of a big red button you should do ..."
        14y ago

pedrogrande 14y ago

Personally, I love the new GMail interface and have been using it for months. I like that is less cluttered and that I can more easily configure what is displayed. I've changed the buttons to be text in the settings as I did find the icons hard to pick at a glance. I also love the new themes. It's interesting to me to see so many people grumble at interface changes whether it's Facebook or Gmail.

BlackNapoleon 14y ago
Same...

bane 14y ago

As much as a I dislike the new Gmail design, I'm fine with it, why? I almost never use the Gmail site. I'm either getting my mail with Thunderbird or my tablet or phone. I almost never have a reason to do otherwise.

nkurz 14y ago

I'm in the same boat, and think the usability of the new interface is terrible. And the pretentiousness of the "form over function" design still makes me gag. But Chrome plugins like "Minimalist for Everything" make it almost bearable. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde... This and similar tools let hide and modify GMail with custom CSS and Javascript. Instead of trying to convince Google to behave rationally, it's easier to try to warp the new interface into something usable. I think about half the things in the article are already covered. If only I could figure out a way to get the "stars" on the same side in the message view as on the overview...

njharman 14y ago

Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste. To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.

pirateking 14y ago
Great analogy between a designer's idea of "taste", and the engineers equivalent "elegance". To take it further, just as the shortest code isn't always the best, the most minimal design is also not best by default.

njharman 14y ago

andymangold 14y ago

Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who don't understand design abusing style and visual trends. The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.

twelvechairs 14y ago

One of the main problems why the 'clean design' has not actually benefitted users is because of gmails feature creep. Where once I could just write and recieve mail, now, by default, I have 'stars', 'circles', 'importance markers', '+ share', 'notifications', 'gadgets'... etc. all confusing my view of my mail. Most users don't want any of these things, and they certainly don't want to have to spend mental energy realising they dont want them, then hunting around in settings menus to see if you can actually turn them off... There are some good design additions in the revised gmail too, but IMHO the above is really what makes gmail feel much more cluttered and cumbersome than it was before....

halayli 14y ago

Forcing users to relearn an interface without providing any added value makes no sense. I ended up moving to Mail.app (which isn't perfect) because of the hideous in-page scrolling forced on me in the new Gmail interface. Desktop experience is unbeatable; snappier interface, better performance, wider access to system resources, better integration with the OS, and you don't have to rely on the browser to be open all the time. I find this advantageous especially when composing emails.

teflonhook 14y ago

The new UI SUCKS!!!!

KaeseEs 14y ago

I'm incredulous that one of the goals of the redesign was to make more powerful themes. New-style themes are much, much less powerful than the old-style themes - cf. the new Terminal theme, which can't even change the text color or font, but is rather a hollow shell of itself with a small gif of a blinking green cursor in the upper left corner the only remnant of its old self. A preview of the old page in my Opera speed dial is all that remains of my old green-on-black monospace friend; I have set it to never update. Incidentally, the new UI for video calls makes the 'end' button the same color as the background, and it is very difficult to see.

deleted 14y ago

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theootz 14y ago

Pretty horrible list IMO... 1) Try a different theme, it may help if it really affects you that much. But this is the only one I somewhat agree with as being possibly an issue; but nothing I really thought of when first looking at the new UI 2) The marker is more than far enough away to make it easy to scan through IMO. This feels far too subjective to just throw out and be like "yea this is definitely a bad change" without doing some testing first. Either way, you can disable this from settings. (Disable snippets iirc?) 3) This too can be disabled: go to settings and change it to text labels instead of graphical labels? As much as I used to hate the new look too, I think it's improved enough since its first iteration to get out of the way and let me do my thing. Though, I still REALLY hate the fact that you can't click on the "Google" logo at the top left to go back to the main page for whatever application you happen to be at. I have no idea why they would remove that...

drostie 14y ago

> I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody > could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it > because it was unfamiliar. It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar belongs to this tab. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing. I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is not the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those cannot be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.

lani 14y ago

thank gawd - someone needed to say that . we're all helpless with google's arm-twisting us to accept the new email-look, or going back, forcing youtube users to start using a gmail id ..

adrianhoward 14y ago

Now, personally speaking, I don't like a bunch of the changes (those damn icons being the most annoying - and yes I know you can change them to text and I have :-). I can certainly criticise some stuff that gets in the way of my personal workflow. But hey - I'm not the 'average' GMail user. Expecting Google for optimise for me is daft. A couple of random thoughts from usability tests I've done over the years: * People are treating the changes to gmail in isolation. Google has changed and integrated design over all of their products. Some parts of a system can get "worse", but still help the overall system get "better". I've seen this when we culled some specialised hi-density layouts on a particular part of a larger system that pissed off some expert users who spent all their time there - but opened up the functionality to be used by a much larger population who were more familiar with the "normal" look. * People don't know what Google is optimising for. Usability and usability testing isn't necessarily about "making things nice for the user". It's about meeting the business goal. For example I've seen users hate the fact we took some layout and colour preferences away from them, despite the fact that overall satisfaction went up, and efficiency increased even for the users who hated the change. * I 100% guarantee that the people commenting here are not "normal" as far as Google is concerned. Does it matter if the geeks like me hate that they can see less e-mail at a time, if the other 99% of the market is jumping for joy that they're not repeatedly clicking on the wrong e-mail? Sometimes you just can't make everybody happy - so have to make a decision over which audience you want to be happy. You will generally have a more successful product if 60% of your audience goes "yay" rather than 100% going "meh". * I spend a bunch of my time talking to "normal" users. I've noticed the general reaction to the new GMail be very different from the general reaction here. They either liked it, or just not noticed/expressed an opinion. I suspect Google cares about that user group more than it does me :-) Also, and this is complete guesswork on my part, this feels like a first stage to me. Currently the various apps are very lightly integrated with a mostly pure visual design makeover. I wouldn't be surprised to see more functional integration appear over the next year or two as more people perceive the various Google apps and systems as an integral "thing".

rubynerd 14y ago

What I don't like is colour as a premium feature, you pay with your social profile

barcoder 14y ago

What I hate most is that when typing an email it is contained in a fixed size box. I can't fill my screen with my email, I have to scroll inside the box to move up and down.

bceagle 14y ago

I just don't get this article from the sense that I have used GMail as my primary email client for the past 5 years and I their redesign didn't affect me at all. The things this author talks about seem to be more of personal preferences than actual objective thought. There has only been one thing that has ever really bugged me about GMail and it has nothing to do with the visual design. I don't like how they treat Folders and Tags as sort of the same thing. In my mind, they are two separate things. I want to organize my mail into folders, but I also want to tag them with keywords that have cross-cutting concerns (ex. folders Work or Home, but tags like Expenses that could be on emails in both folders). Now, I understand that what I am talking about is sort of a personal preferences as well, but I guess my point is that I would care more about changes to functionality in GMail than small, minor visual changes like the ones this author describes. I sort of agree with their mentality that people eventually figure out the new UI and then it is no longer an issue.

spinchange 14y ago

My wife and I think they are optimizing for women. No empirical basis for this, it just seems like every one is aping UI elements and styles from Pinterest these days.

mrweasel 14y ago

The part I find interesting is that whole "minimalism" part. Simply removing stuff or add icons in favor of text buttons have nothing to do with minimalism necessarily. I don't claim to be a minimalism expert, but more often than not people who talk about minimalism seems to think it's either cleaning up your house or removing stuff that "People don't really need", without figuring about what the basic needs actually are. Removing all door handles from your house doesn't make it a minimalist home.

andypants 14y ago

The new icons remind me of visual studio's new redesign. Monochrome icons, no text. Ugh, horrible to use.

saturdaysaint 14y ago

Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble. I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).

jetz 14y ago

Actually they don't have much choices on dropping some specific email features to make UI better. Anyways I think it's just like MS Metro. One cannot say OMG this is cool as we say with Apple properties but people continue to use those (inferior) UIs.

nollidge 14y ago

Please, for the love of Loki, can we all stop equating our subjective opinions with objective truth? Your tastes are different than others. That doesn't make them "arrogant" - at least, not necessarily.

ditojim 14y ago

change is good in general. this change to gmail's interface is good in general. all 3 points in the article can be adjusted by changing a user setting.

emehrkay 14y ago

So no mention of the font size of this blog's content? The comments are larger than the content

d5tryr 14y ago

I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone: Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan. On your first point though you are simply wrong. The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter. The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface. The same is true for coloured backgrounds. If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity. This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode. Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do. I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.

billmcneale 14y ago

It's spelled "Gmail", lowercase 'm'. Source: the Gmail blog, http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/ http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/