Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 283 posts

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

#191

Post by [deleted] »

phnk wrote: post #146
reeeprgenx wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX Pro here. Google pays senior UX folks an average $160,000 they have "degrees" from third rate Unis like Stanford and Cal Poly tech. How dumb can they be? Do you think they will ever make any money?

Skipping the "UX Pro" creds, I trust that the rest of your post is correct: Google has well-paid UX engineers from the best places. That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by mrieck »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #68
babuskov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to do that. It is faster, but the font choice and color choice is awful. If you have a lot of e-mail, it's so hard to discern threads and read subjects. I feel like being forced to choose between two bad versions of GMail.

Could this be fixed for you with userstyles? It's not a proper solution, but basic HTML should be amendable to some quick quality-of-life styling.

There are no tabs in basic HTML view. That pretty much makes it unusable to me.

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

#193

Post by emerged »

J_cst wrote: post #96

For me (I'm in Italy) the best part was the request: " would you like to switch now or in two weeks?". I use the same with my kids: "would you like one portion of broccoli or two portions?". This approach gives the perception of being able to choose.

I kept just ignoring the option. That is apparently not an option, though.

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

#194

Post by Spooky23 »

dangwu wrote: post #67
thrower123 wrote: post #27

I 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...

I would assume that a huge majority of the load time is fetching data from Google's servers - not a CPU or memory intensive operation

Usually that’s <120ms. JavaScript is typically the most intensive op.

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

#196

Post by RickS »

amflare wrote: post #110
joshuawright11 wrote: post #20

Is it really that bad...? It looks about the same as the old with a material coat of paint.

The hover effects are atrocious.

This is definitely the one that bugs me most. So distracting! All the hovered rows jump out now, where before they just changed gray ever so slightly.

This is a place where the metaphors of material design subtract more value than they add.

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

#198

Post by romwell »

kroltan wrote: post #31

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!

Opera 12 for me solely for the mail client.

(They did spin off Opera Mail as a separate app, but I see no point in it, since it's just Opera 12 with the browser part disabled).

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

#200

Post by megakid »

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.

100% agree, infact I now use it as an example to our CTO who is absolutely deadset on actively spending time on replacing our inhouse expert UI frontends (currently written in native UIs, blazing fast etc) with web frontends. Yes they can be effective + fast, but telling a room of native devs to convert everything to web will end badly if not given the proper support.
Post reply on HN