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I always clicked on the gmail logo, and it drives me batty that they changed it. It's just an easier target for the mouse/my eyes than that little reload button, or, even worse, the inbox link.
I sooooo agree. Although I rarely, if ever click on the logo in gmail, I do believe in the "logo should be a link to the root" convention. Surely that's just UI design 101, right? The twitter one you mentioned in the article drives me super crazy as well.
Some reasoning: It gets (read:forces) you to use the top bar. For people that always ignored the topbar before; they cannot now. So these users, as well as everyone else who used it only sporadically, are now using it always and thus are more likely to investigate and use other links/apps on the topbar now. These of course include all of the other google services. It's like herding cattle.
EDIT: interesting change: on my local google.ch, the top left google icon is clickable but no hover (hand) icon appears.
Some reasoning: It gets (read:forces) you to use the top bar. For people that always ignored the topbar before; they cannot now. So these users, as well as everyone else who used it only sporadically, are now using it always and thus are more likely to investigate and use other links/apps on the topbar now. These of course include all of the other google services. It's like herding cattle.
this seems to me as the most plausible explanation. I reckon the average user might use one or two more google products: maps and gmail. he probably accesses gmail via gmail.com and maps via maps.google.com and never even cared about the black top bar. EDIT: interesting change: on my local google.ch, the top left google icon is clickable but no hover (hand) icon appears.
One has a very... unique experience as to who an average user is if one believes the average user understands subdomains. (Or, increasingly, anything that goes into a URL box other than a search term which may occasionally have a .com in it due to legacy branding.)
Does anyone remember a few weeks back, when Google tested a "new way to browse Google's services"? They turned the logo into a button, producing a drop-down menu of services to navigate to.
My guess is that they found the new logo-button didn't work well, mainly because so many users saw the logo as a big button which refreshed the page or went to the inbox.
At the risk of making predictions, I'd guess this recent change is a grace period, designed to get us all used to using other buttons for reaching the inbox. And once people no longer instinctively click the logo-button, they'll introduce the new navigation which makes better use of that valuable screen space.
I could very well be way off the mark here... but it seems pretty clever to me, TBH.