Get Thunderbird (or any other standalone email app). Extremely traditional UI, and better responsiveness due to no frill JS and no tracking.
Bonus, even read your emails offline!
Innovation!
Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
31–40 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#32Do you have any comparison screenshots? I've been using Thunderbird for years now, and haven't spent much time with the webui. I just looked at it, and it doesn't seem much different from what I remember. Maybe the roll out hasn't hit me yet?
I don't have screenshots, but the new UI looks like it was designed for touch screens. The actual mail messages take up maybe 50% of the screen in the middle, with different sized margins full of mostly huge, but some very tiny, buttons to press on each side. Some of the buttons don't even have descriptions, it's just an icon for another Google product. There's also a smattering of giant buttons and icons scattered across the page, with no consistency as to their size or alignment. It makes me think of someone creating their first website, where it started out OK, but they feel the need to keep adding features and filling in empty space so they just add more and more buttons and icons all over the page that are only sort of related to the main purpose of the page.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#33Amen. What really bugs me is it loads instantly in Chrome but in Firefox is does it's loading animation and refreshes once or twice usually taking a few seconds just to load the page.
Yup, it's infuriating how long it takes to access my inbox with the new interface (just counted 6 seconds to a usable interface on my work machine), mostly due to the awful new splash screen. On top of that they added a bunch of padding, which reduces the information density (taking a page from Reddit's book).
Gmail has been my last reservation on dropping Google entirely, and I think this is the last straw for me.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#34I hope they're not removing the revert option for Classic UI :(
Having an API unable to support two clients (Classic and New) would be embarassing from an engineering POV.
And from an UX POV, it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users. There are all kind of reasons why a given person might prefer UI a to b (a being older having nothing to do).
As you reach more humans, you have to embrace diversity. The views from a handful of hipster designers in SF shouldn't irreversibly impact how the rest of the world interacts with their computers.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#35Google web UX has gotten horrific.
I used to visit Google News multiple times per day. Then the UX went to hell there too. Each iteration became worse. After the latest changes, it became so unbearably hideous and clunky that I couldn't stand it anymore. I got mad every time I loaded the site. But years of keyboard memory still had me typing in the URL constantly, getting mad every time it loaded up. I finally black holed it in /etc/hosts to break the habit.
Gmail is in a similar state now. The new UI is hideous and clunky. And on the engineering side, it takes multiple seconds to load up. I thought Googlers were supposed to be known for their engineering competence?
Calendar? Bleh. It's still in a tolerable state, but visually the previous release was easier to work with.
Bring back contrast. Bring back visual dividers. Stop with the clown buttons like the mega "Compose"... these are tools we use for years and we had our first-run experiences over a decade ago.
Fire whoever is driving your god awful UX on web.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#36As others have said, performance is painful. I've also had problems where emails would just not display after clicking on them. It would spin and say 'loading'. I like the look of it but speed is part of a design and needs to be addressed.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#37Google people -- It doesn't work!! I will click a label only to get an empty window with no emails
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#38As much as the comments here are mostly leaning towards one side keep in mind that 99% of the users probably don't care and I'm sure they have the data to back this up.
Where would they get that data? Users are given no way to voice negative feedback.
If most users are like most non-techies I know, I assure you, they do care. There's just nothing they can do, beyond telling first couple people they encounter that they hate the new UI, and carrying on with their lives. Because what are they going to do? Move 10 years of their e-mail history to Microsoft and IM/phone 500 people about their new address?
--
This is, by the way, my fully generic response to "the market shows users like web bloat". No, they don't. They just don't have a choice but to accept it.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#39As much as the comments here are mostly leaning towards one side keep in mind that 99% of the users probably don't care and I'm sure they have the data to back this up.
I've been using GMail since 2004 and I'm not having any trouble, even in Firefox.
Same. I’m actually at google but I’m not going to tell the gmail team about this post because
1. I don’t agree with it, and
2. Gmail team is already painfully aware that any given change will be unappealing to a subset of users.
3. They are probably already here, taking note, considering.
Unfortunately we can’t all have a custom UI written exactly to our specifications. Gmail team has to try to do what they think is best for most users. For the rest, there are various gmail UI tweak extensions for Chrome and Firefox, or you can write your own userscript or use an IMAP client.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
#40I have one browser tab that hasn't been refreshed since before this travesty was dropped. I'm going to try to keep that one going as long as possible... The unnecessary animations irk me. I'm clocking 5-10 seconds to load and render my inbox, on a quad-core i7 with oodles of RAM and a fat network pipe. Whereas the basic view loads in 700 ms...
Lucky you! Don't turn off the computer!