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How to cope with the Gmail redesign

jasoncrawford.org

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Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#91

Post by nextparadigms »

mattmanser wrote: post #57
andrewfelix wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>large companies can't actually realise that their design departments are not doing a great job There are obviously a lot of unhappy users with legitimate gripes. But Google would probably be looking at the growth of Gmail to validate what ever the design department is doing. That growth is pretty impressive.

Growth? Gmail grew 3 or 4 years ago. I wouldn't recommend Gmail to anyone now, it's just another Hotmail type service, there's nothing special or good about Gmail anymore. What really surprised me is how few of my friends get the 'conversation' view even in 2012. After too many awkward conversations and now their 'we've got absolutely no design skills and can't design for shit' redesign, I'm just shrugging when peopl…

Gmail is 3-4 times bigger now than it was then. I think it's approaching 300 million users now.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#92

Post by rdl »

I can't imagine using gmail for high-volume email; I've used it at various times due to being lazy about setting up something better, but ugh.

mutt is so much better, using maildirs synced with imap (with mbsync or something). Totally customizable, per-folder triggers, and works in a terminal.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#95

Post by jan_g »

I'm obviously in minority here, but I don't stress too much about the design as long as unread messages are in bold text. But this might be due to me working mostly in terminals and text/code editors, where design never was a top priority.

The things I care about most in gmail are:

  1. reliability, speed and lots of space
  2. good spam filtering
  3. web view of various office documents (I used to cringe when someone sent me .doc or .xls, not anymore)
  4. fast search which also includes gtalk conversations (invaluable)
If one or two of these things goes away, then I'll probably switch.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#96

Post by rachelbythebay »

copper wrote: post #85
mikegioia wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, what do/would you recommend? I'm really curious because I honestly can't think of ONE email service that does email better than Gmail.

fastmail's non-free service, maybe? I got it a very long time ago, mainly for the .in email address. It's been no-frills, fast, and (mostly) reliable. I'm still not sure I'd recommend it to a gmail user, but its been a good email account to have.

Careful - don't rely on fastmail for XMPP. I switched to them based on them having that, since I used it a lot with Gmail. Then I found out that fastmail is running some super wobbly XMPP server which kicks you off any time you really get going really quickly in a conversation.

I've opened multiple tickets, and all they can say is "sorry" and "we know about it" and "we're working on it", but actual fixes still haven't come. Having a solid chat experience obviously is not high on their priority list.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#97

Post by justincormack »

davux wrote: post #9

I ended up leaving Gmail a few months ago (knowing this was coming). The new design works really poorly with browser zoom. I need to view the page zoomed in to 300% or so most of the time (I don't have good vision). Zooming really worked pretty well on all of the past iterations, up until this one. There are a number of panes that stay visible when scrolling, so the content area on the web page becomes really really…

You can use Exchange rather than Imap with Gmail.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#98

Post by rachelbythebay »

kfury wrote: post #84

I designed the original Gmail UX and I have to admit I'd changed every pref in my accounts exactly as Jason did. Good call.

Aha! I must thank you for your original design. I have a question, though: did you intend for people to frequently click "select unstarred" (or similar) and [archive] at the top to cull the list? I used to use it that way to deal with the flood of mail coming in (prod lists, oncall pages, etc.) and it always just felt right. I've always wondered if that was intentional or just something I happened to land on.

When they pulled that out in 2010, that was the beginning of the end for me. "0.07% of people use select unstarred", apparently.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#99

Post by twelvechairs »

andrewfelix wrote: post #73
twelvechairs wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Google would probably be looking at the growth of Gmail to validate what ever the design department is doing. If past performance is your primary way of to 'validate' anything, you obviously have a very poor understanding of the subject matter and are going to lag behind those who do.

I'm not entirely sure what you're stating here. Businesses shouldn't look at past performances in order to make judgements about future performance? And those who ignore it will have an edge?

No. Thats not at all what I said.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#100

Post by vl »

TamDenholm wrote: post #2

Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.

It all good advise, exactly to the point what I use except for the theme - I use "Soft gray" - it's works better with preview pane lab and gets rid of the huge red button.
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