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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

#231

Post by colanderman »

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…

"Classic UI" is itself a misnomer of course.

They ditched the original – and best – UI years ago. Each iteration has dropped visual cues and made it harder for the eye to distinguish elements from each other. GMail has just been relegated to spam duty for me since then.

Basic HTML mode at least still has a decent UI.

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

#232

Post by colanderman »

Animats wrote: post #64
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!

I've been using Thunderbird on desktops and laptops, and K9 mail on Android, for years. Works fine. All you need is an IMAP server. Mine is hosted by Sonic and comes with my DSL service.

I really wish I could recommend K9 to anyone, but the search functionality is beyond broken. (I used to use it for FastMail because their own app loads oxymoronically slowly, but I just couldn't deal with the broken search functionality.) Have you found a way to work around this?

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

#233

Post by colanderman »

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

> you're change averse

It's funny that that's used like it's a negative thing.

No-one wants their tools to change out from under them. Shuffling stuff around for no reason subverts learned skill in using a tool, decreasing its usefulness. And the only purpose of a tool is to be useful.

The fact that Google makeovers are that – makeovers – rather than incremental enhancements, tells me that they don't really have a purpose beyond looking good, or allowing some internal rearchitecting that is incompatible with the old design. If the changes are really productivity enhancements, why save them up to roll out as a distracting redesign?

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

#234

Post by colanderman »

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.

Patronizing dialogues like these just underscore the disdain Google shows for its users.

Treat users like adults; respect them. If you (UI designer) think you know better: you don't, you're just cocky. If you can't think of another way to get users to accept your new design: it's probably because it sucks, and you shouldn't have made something no-one asked for in the first place.

(Wait, are we talking about GMail, or Windows 10?)

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

#237

Post by dragon96 »

I don't understand how this qualifies as a "painful" or "horrific" update.

It seems that most of the hate is either about (a) a slower loading screen or (b) worse design. The latter is debatable, but the former is just a ridiculous complaint. At worst, the load seems to be around 0.5 seconds slower on a mediocre internet connection, so if you can't spare an extra 5 seconds a day from refreshing Gmail 10 times a day, you should consider checking your email a little bit less often.

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

#238

Post by RikNieu »

thrower123 wrote: post #88
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...

By the time the new UI has loaded in and stopped churning, I'm up to 225 requests, pulling down over 5mb. Most of these seem to be tiny pngs for button icons... Why aren't these spritesheeted? Basic view is 9 requests for 24 kb...

5mb!? Wth!

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

#239

Post by vishal0123 »

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!

Is that better than Mail for Mac? My only need is reliable syncing and fast update, which Mac's mail is ok at, but needs variable amount of time for refresh, and if I need to verify my email, I mostly just open Gmail web.

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

#240

Post by kirb »

mrbonner wrote: post #137
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?

Firefox has severe performance issues on high dpi displays on macOS. It’s gotten better in the latest nightlies but still an issue. As an unfortunate (for your eyes) workaround you can do Get Info on Firefox.app and enable low resolution compatibility mode, then restart Firefox.
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