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What happened, Gmail?

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Re: What happened, Gmail?

#51

Post by pmlnr »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #49
pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security. It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.

e-MAIL. The stress is on the mail part. When your Grandfather sends a letter via post, he doesn't expect it to be his anymore, does he?

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#52

Post by jimmies »

I'm sure the Gmail team has done great research on this, and this might have worked for the majority of the users, but just not for some power users such as Hacker News readers. And I think, that's because we might have one false belief, that is User Experience/User Interface is one big, beautiful, monolithic top of the mountain everyone wants to reach. It is not: Power users and the normies might have different needs. A normie like your mom and mine don't know how to turn off annoying notification emails from Facebook, so they might need a tool to help them hide spammy emails. They need something easy to hit, hard to miss, because they use their fingers to point. But you and I use keyboard shortcut and know exactly not to give our serious email addresses away, we don't need that.

An UX that is great for your mom and mine might be bad for you and I.

I noticed that on one of my project that got on Hacker News and Hackaday, then got viral on reddit and media and such a week or so later. It has both a github and a couple of videos linked on the site. What I noticed from my rudimentary Cloudflare log and Youtube analytics was that the HN crowd read and looked at the github, but most didn't watch the video. The normies crowd watched the video, but most didn't read. To me, it was kinda funny.

I think that's part of the crisis that GNOME 3 suffered lately. I seriously tried GNOME 3 for a while and their macOS approach - simplify, trying to make good choices by default - genuinely sucks for me. I want to see my options, don't hide them away from me. I want to be able to make choices. The problem that the GNOME 3 team doesn't realize is that their users aren't made up of majority normies. They are the ones who are savvy enough to install a Linux distro on their desktop. They are the ones that will go great lengths to customize something to make it work exactly the way they wanted. And GNOME 3 fails to deliver that [1].

At first when I worked on my project, I wanted to create something very simple that "just works." As time went by, it turned out to me many of my users, the ones that stick and support my project aren't the ones that just install and forget. They read the docs, wiki and the source code to tease out what I was trying to do. So I realized having a great, updated wiki is a very valuable asset. It takes great pain to do it, but it is worth it.

The problem with project that are extremely popular like Gmail is that you tend to carter for the mass. But are they loyal? Are they the ones that actually use and love your product? Are they the ones that influence other people's choices? I think those are the questions worth asking and considering when designing products.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8etezq/_/

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#53

Post by therealmarv »

xoxoavi wrote: post #50
therealmarv wrote: post #48

Extra First Class World problems: Inbox is not optimized for iPhone X. Everytime I read this I cringe. How about the thought that your phone broke common UI behaviour and not your software which needs to adapt to a new screen culture. I'm sure very soon Inbox will support iPhone X. But there are many other problems in Inbox which I see more important like Unspam emails without Gmail.

True that. But I hope that's not your only take away from the article :) Still they updated everything else - so I guess they didn't cringe at that. Apple breaking UI standards, yap, they always do, gotta write on that too.

No that's not the my only take from the article ;)

btw. I've read once in a German Blog that using on iPhone the app Outlook as a frontend for Inbox works really well. Never tried it myself but it seems this Frankenstein setup works better than expected.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#54

Post by saagarjha »

therealmarv wrote: post #48

Extra First Class World problems: Inbox is not optimized for iPhone X. Everytime I read this I cringe. How about the thought that your phone broke common UI behaviour and not your software which needs to adapt to a new screen culture. I'm sure very soon Inbox will support iPhone X. But there are many other problems in Inbox which I see more important like Unspam emails without Gmail.

> How about the thought that your phone broke common UI behaviour

Ok, sure…

> and not your software which needs to adapt to a new screen culture.

Why not? UI paradigms change all the time, and software usually keeps up if it wants to stay relevant. How is this different?

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#55

Post by Jaruzel »

pmlnr wrote: post #32

Email was meant to be kept simple, and Google is making this exponentially hard with every single "design" iteration. Get off Gmail - it'll break your email. The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promoti…

> Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.

I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they compatible with GMail's ?

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#56

Post by pmlnr »

jimmies wrote: post #52

I'm sure the Gmail team has done great research on this, and this might have worked for the majority of the users, but just not for some power users such as Hacker News readers. And I think, that's because we might have one false belief, that is User Experience/User Interface is one big, beautiful, monolithic top of the mountain everyone wants to reach. It is not: Power users and the normies might have different need…

> so they might need a tool to help them hide spammy emails.

They need a tool to make the source of the spam stop spamming them, not a tool to hide this. Sweeping the dirt under that carpet is not an actual solution or fix.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#57

Post by saagarjha »

nukeop wrote: post #7

Material Design is one of the worst things that ever happened to the design of websites, not only Google's but everyone's, since now so many are trying to copy it. I have no idea why anyone would want to see it anywhere.

I actually quite liked the initial implementation that Google published in their original set of guidelines. The issue, I think, was that nobody, including Google, implemented it that way so we ended up with a bunch of substandard interpretations of how "material design" was supposed to look like instead of the real thing.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#58

Post by xoxoavi »

ex3ndr wrote: post #39
ex3ndr wrote: post #27

Article is a little bit biased as a one who worked on messaging apps claiming that messaging (eg Slack) solve communication is just wrong. Outlook screenshot is very simple and clean but... it mentioned as an example of nightmare.. Looks like author got in the his own bubble just like google.

> An efficient way to categorize, filter and search content. No, no one likes to categorize emails, this is work for someone else or for power users that's not a case for GMail. > A tool to help users fix mistakes they’ve made, such as sending someone the wrong email, or spelling something incorrectly. For a long time Telegram didn't want to introduce this feature since if you sent something this should be in other's…

I think these suggestions make some sense since they are still problems that exist. The way you'd imagine solving them could be different if you were on that team, with the data and would iterate to find the solution. The bullet points under the innovation section are not suggestions for solutions, on the contrary, they are problems that users still have. For each of these problems, there are services that are trying to solve that problem. Take scheduling a meeting as an example. Google's solution was to bring the calendar into Gmail and increase complexity. X.AI's solution is to make a bot that coordinates. Some other companies will have different solutions. The point is, what is the best solution for a user who is in the frame of mind of emailing. It is very easy to stuff things from different places one on top of another and it's called sustained innovation (if I'm not mistaken). But what ideally should happen is finding new ways to adapt these extra services, including these problems in a way that is matched with the main use case. Otherwise, it gets complex.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#59

Post by alkonaut »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #22
alkonaut wrote: post #6

Those that don’t use inbox, why? I’m sure there are features of gmail that are missing from inbox but what are they? Why do Google keep these two “forks” of the same product?

Because Inbox doesn't allow you to separate reminders from your email, which means I have to scroll two pages to see a single email, and then carefully hunt for it among 50 reminders.

This is exactly what I'm wondering (for example) - what is a reminder?

Edit: nvm I found a video explaining it. Probably never missed it bevause I use a separate calebdar and never use Google for that.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#60

Post by rangewookie »

I created an account to comment on the good experience I was having with the update.

I did a side-by-side comparison of the old UI and the new UI and I've changed my stance. The old one is a better "email" UI, but google is trying to mature the email experience.

A big problem here is that email showing it's age. Google is eager to hide less common tools behind menus. They want to delete all of the old "manual" buttons/tools so their smart filters can take over. It wont work. The truth is everyone likes email because it's fairly consistent, but we're forever trapped in 90's tech.

Instant messengers have transformed the way that we communicate, but email hasn't caught up. Maybe... it shouldn't.

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