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Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#131

Post by snackman7 »

Udik wrote: post #111
nieksand wrote: post #35

Google 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…

> Fire whoever is driving your god awful UX on web. I have the feeling that UX specialists are actually the problem. When you employ people to work on UX and design, well, they will work on it, even if there is nothing to do. So you get periodic redesigns that improve nothing but justify the existence of a bunch of people whose purpose in life is to propose UX changes.

Interesting point. But could they solve the issue?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#132

Post by ThrustVectoring »

The new Gmail UI handles attachments differently: when you receive an email with an attachment, a summary of the attachment gets put in underneath the title of the email.

The problem with this is that this is done dynamically on load, and there's a delay. So you can be scrolling through old emails, and then suddenly where everything is on the screen changes because new content finished loading in the middle of what you were looking at.

Plus it makes the height of emails inconsistent, which is significantly harder to parse visually.

It's kind of a small thing, but it honestly should not have passed UI review processes at all. Don't fucking load new content in the middle of what people are interacting with. It's 101 level stuff here.

Edit: apparently there's a setting for "Default", "Comfortable", or "Compact", and that email account was on "Default" but should've been on "Compact", which is way better.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#133

Post by jackewiehose »

kgwxd wrote: post #85

Ugg, everything was doing great with "flat design", I knew that wasn't going to last, designers have to justify their position every few years after all. I don't use Chrome often but I notices the bubbly round crap was making a come back. I wouldn't care about the gmail change, because I don't use the web interface often, but this company-wide redesign likely means everyone else will be following suit. Mozilla, if yo…

> I knew that wasn't going to last, designers have to justify their position every few years after all

Yes, I think no UI-designer job should exist full time in one product. At some time the design should be done. If not, you either screwed up or the design is already great and from now on you will screw up.

Windows 8/10 is another example. From Windows 7 it just went downhill.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#134

Post by iforgotpassword »

reeeprgenx wrote: post #115
save_ferris wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's especially bad on Firefox. With that, and the fact that Google is killing Inbox, it feels like time to look for alternatives.

Please leave GMAIL. I hear AOL has got it going on.

Hey op, I found the googler ;)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#135

Post by mrfredward »

sp332 wrote: post #30
mrfredward wrote: post #14

The auto-expanding sidebar drives me nuts. I don't want to use the entire width of my widescreen monitor for reading an email, but I do want quick access to my folders.

Hit the "hamburger" icon way up in the left corner next to the main Gmail logo.

Thanks. My brain has been trained to think of this behavior as "pinning", now I'll just have to get used to the hamburger.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#136

Post by kgwxd »

forgot-my-pw wrote: post #13
dewey wrote: post #10

As 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.

There's always resistance to new changes, but if we never change, we can't innovate. - just a user

I see no innovation in the new design. What's the opposite of innovate? Outnovate?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#137

Post by mrbonner »

hawski wrote: post #18

I don't mind the look that much, but it's painfully slow. When an application gains a animated splash screen I know that it's time has come. I'm using a Chromebook, so in a way a Google blessed device and it's annoyingly slow. I'm switching to basic HTML view. If it will disappear I will get off gmail for good.

I have a 2015 MBP with 16GB of RAM and a core i5. The experience using Firefox with the new Gmail UI with this laptop is nothing but sluggish. I have to switch back to the old UI. I am not sure what I would do after Google takes away the old UI. What the hell is going on at Google?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#138

Post by xtracto »

Two things: First, I myself miss the Q shortcut in Google Calendar, gone after the redesign.

Second, I know for a fact that there are plenty of Google employees here. It is funny to see the radio silence. Somewhere within Google there is an email thread generating the HR compliant reply for this thread.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#139

Post by kgwxd »

Jaruzel wrote: post #101

Do the IMAP or SMTP/POP3 options still work in GMail? If so, maybe it's time for a proxy WebMail UI hosted on a tiny VPS that simply acts as the mail client for you, whilst gmail still does all the heavy lifting of spam filtering and trusted sending.

Standard protocols still work. Why not just use a proper email client instead of a VPS hosted web UI?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful

#140

Post by Boulth »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #53
shadyrudy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sort by sender.

And search, in a way in which you can trust the search actually covered all your e-mails.

Actually search is the worst feature of Thunderbird in my opinion and I use Thunderbird for years and think it's great otherwise. Search constantly doesn't find something even if I use the keyword thay was in the email (verified using Inbox) or poorly sorts them (relevance algorithm is really weak) or displays result threads in inconsistent manner (many emails are duplicated etc.)
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