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What happened, Gmail?

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Re: What happened, Gmail?

#61

Post by megous »

chenster wrote: post #12

@google, check this: https://dribbble.com/shots/4020485-Inbox-Client/attachments/... . It's better than yours. Never a fan of material design.. seriously, Google is NOT good at design. Period. I hoped, in this Gmail iteration, Google would finally take the plunge and kill the flat icons and minimalist design and once for all. It's quite the opposite unfortunately. It got flatter and uglier. All so plain and washed ou…

I noticed InVision in the e-mail. That's the worst design of an app I had to use so far. Icons everywhere without explanation (you have to hover), a lot of stuff has extremely annoying gray (like text in #ddd, so you see it on screen that there's something there, but can't read it)

Why designers don't use background to highlight active items, while keeping text/icons high contrast, instead of making everything unreadable, and using black color to barely highlight what's focussed, is beyond me.

It's all extremely gimicky, especially all those useless animations of huge areas of the page.

I never understood what it's for, aside from commenting on screens - and it does shitty job at that too - you start typing a comment but you can't move the fucking comment box around so that it doesn't cover the part you're commenting - so you close the comment box, to see and reopen and your unfinished comment is gone. Instead of focussing on important stuff like this, they create shitty gimmicks.

It's almost satirical how it markets itself compared to how bad it is.

And whatever this is it certainly seems inspired by InVision.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#62

Post by Illniyar »

pmlnr wrote: post #51
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

That's the other way around. The grandfather is the one receiving the email that he can't print.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#63

Post by michaelmior »

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…

My understanding is that if you connect with a non-Gmail client or send to a non-Gmail user, the email is just a link to a webpage that enforces the restrictions.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#64

Post by verletx64 »

pferde wrote: post #3

Among "needed innovations", the post lists: "A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later." To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.

How many things are we supposed to do as people? Everybody touts options spanning every domain going from email to mobile devices and it's like, oh it's just a bit of configuration/tweaking for a few hours and then you're good to go.

So yeah, hand holding is good, because to be honest, I don't get up on a Saturday morning and say "oh boy I can't wait to setup my email filters, right after I tweak my Arch Linux install and add a few more lines to my .vimrc!"

This sense of being looked down upon for relinquishing control over things that to be honest, I don't care that much about is just annoying after a time.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#65

Post by alkonaut »

achamayou wrote: post #23
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?

I find the lack of visual density and regularity in Inbox very annoying. Gmail (compact) fits 3/4x times more emails on the same screen, with a single text line of identical size for each. It's very quick and easy to scan through. Inbox looks like a jumbled mess to me, with randomly sized images and pre-rendered images, and it makes me scroll a lot more. Annoyingly, the new UI is slightly less dense than before, but…

I think the key idea behind inbox is that you don't have more than say 5 or 10 emails in your "to do" view. I never had to scroll. I only look at the inbox view (i.e. things I need to deal with) - and that is always fewer than one screen. If I need something from the "already dealt with" screen I do a search, never a visual scan. This might be due to the volume of emails received obviously, but that's why I was wondering. It might also depend on the usage pattern, e.g. I reply to probably fewer than 1 in 100 emails for example.

If I had more emails, or more emails I actually had to address by replies, it might be different. I never noticed the "images" in inbox though. Are those for things like purchases or travels that it renders differently? My emails just look like subject lines, with about the same density in inbox as in classic gmail (Quick check: An inbox email on desktop is a 32px div with 6px padding, while a gmail email is a 39px table row - so quick estimate is 5px more per email for inbox)

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#66

Post by primitur »

pferde wrote: post #3

Among "needed innovations", the post lists: "A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later." To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.

This erosion of responsibility over time is some sort of back force from a wave of generational disillusionment.

We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.

We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.

Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#67

Post by nukeop »

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.

iPhone X is the special needs kid that everyone is tired of.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#68

Post by tehabe »

Inbox looks really nice and is (to me) very simple and I kinda wished Google would have uses Inbox as a template because Inbox has also two things which makes my life really hard: 1 I can't sent emails to groups in my contacts and 2 in the Sent folder it doesn't say to whom I've sent the email but that I sent them, which I already know.

Both issues are also true for the Gmail application on Android.

Re: What happened, Gmail?

#69

Post by spystath »

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.

My personal beef with it is the huge padding everywhere. So much wasted space.
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