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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

#151

Post by jpindar »

babuskov wrote: post #105
eiieirurjdndjd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMHO, you can never win the UI war, because habits. If they improve the speed and make it work as fast as the previous version did, I think most users will learn to live with the new UI.

At which time they'll randomly change it again.

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

#152

Post by phnk »

vemv wrote: post #34

I 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 t…

> it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users

You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.

It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.

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

#153

Post by nsriv »

manimal4today wrote: post #126
cevn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It is extremely slow, esp. on older computers to the point of being unusable. Another app reinvents the wheel and becomes useless.

Yeah my Commodore has issues with Gmail as well.

Hey that's pretty funny, but I'm on a 2014 Thinkpad with an i7, and it's slow and stuttery for me as well.

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

#154

Post by jpindar »

In addition to everything else, they've eliminated the different colored stars & icons. I liked those and used them to highlight mails I wanted to get back to.

Now there's only starred and unstarred. (Be careful how you use 'important', as Google tries to learn from that and gets it wrong.)

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

#155

Post by igetspam »

transpy wrote: post #93

When I realized I can't go back to normal UI, I immediatly downloaded Thunderbird and went back to e-mail clients. I won't bother with the new gmail. Fonts look horrible, it is slower and in the end there is less information density.

The new font weights have such a stark contrast, it's hard to look at. It's enough that I'm finally starting to piece together the parts to leave gsuite for my personal domains.

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

#156

Post by babuskov »

emperorfin wrote: post #90

Here's how I had been using the old Gmail UI or HTML view for several years now. Simply login to your Gmail account. You should see a URL similar to https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/.. . in your browser address bar, just simply change the mu to h and hit enter. You will be taken to the old UI or html view.

I don't have "mu", only "u" and changing it to "h" only gives me the old html interface. I can do the same in the settings.

I had the option to switch back to "classic" a couple of days back, but now it's gone.

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

#157

Post by phnk »

bootlooped wrote: post #128
transpy wrote: post #93

When I realized I can't go back to normal UI, I immediatly downloaded Thunderbird and went back to e-mail clients. I won't bother with the new gmail. Fonts look horrible, it is slower and in the end there is less information density.

Did they take away the ability to use the old UI? I still have a menu item under settings that says "Go back to classic Gmail"

That menu item will vanish soon. Several users have reported it elsewhere in this thread (it has vanished for me too).

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

#158

Post by igetspam »

throwaway43298 wrote: post #103

Xoogler here, but I guarantee: 1) This conversation (and complaints) already happened, repeatedly and in-depth, months ago on various internal lists 2) The response - the Decision is made, you're change averse/not a representative user 3) Whichever PMs/leads/designers involved had an OKR to do Something, so Something had to be done

I do not miss those days. "You're change averse" was the most common accusation made against anyone who disagreed with changes. Change for the sake of change is rarely a good starting point but that never mattered. The web teams would come up with new and shiny way to do things and everyone would have to jump through hoops to get their properties updated. I'll never forget when PDB was replaced with P. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it and neither could most engineers I knew but hey, at least it was different.

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

#159

Post by tarboreus »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #127
treis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must have a super computer because it is blazing fast for me after an initial 1-2s load time.

Hmm. I haven't perceived any slow down. Especially not like others here are saying. Gmail still seems pretty quick to me.

Are you using a computer from the last 4 years and sitting one mile away from where the app was created? Conditions aren't the same everywhere, and you can look to see how much memory it's using, which is a lot, and it's unconcerned with reliability and redundancy in communication with the server.

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

#160

Post by tarboreus »

snackman7 wrote: post #131
Udik wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Fire 80% of the frontend engineers and save a buck?
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