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I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

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Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#11

Post by msrpotus »

sp332 wrote: post #8
Blinkky wrote: post #2

I wouldn't consider myself a gmail power user, but I do use it as my every day email. I love the new updates. Most of the things that gmail makes hard (and when the author says hard he means an extra click) are things that are rarely, if ever, done by me. This is exactly how I think email should function, make the stuff you use most easy. The author mentions things like "It's hard to delete my signature." I've never…

When Gmail first launched, they made a big deal of the fact that their user testing revealed ~11 different types of user with distinct workflows. They made sure the Gmail interface supported all those workflows well. It seems like the new interface is going after just one or two, and making life harder for everyone else. I think I will switch back to a desktop email client for day-to-day use and only use the web inte…

Do you have a link? Curious to see what kind of user I am (I also generally like the new interface; seems perfectly fine for me).

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#13

Post by hdragomir »

Considering Google made all those changes to make the experience better and managing mails easier for most people, I think the author should recognise that he's in the minority - an edge case - and maybe consider switching to an email client that suits his needs rather than whine about one that works just great for many other people.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#15

Post by Fuzzwah »

I'm torn between strongly agreeing with these points and wanting to comment pointing out that none of them matter..... I hate change for change's sake, but the new gmail compose window has made me more efficient. It took some getting used to however.

Responses to the points made in the article:

1) I can’t easily delete my signatures.

Forget about deleting your sig and generally cleaning up email threads. Decent email clients do this on their own and are we really that worried about a few extra bytes of data these days?

2) I can’t easily change my email subject.

If its time to edit the subject of an email thread maybe it is time to hit the big read "compose" button and start from scratch anyway.

3) Ok, so what if you want to insert a link or something.

Drag and drop from the address bar. So easy.

4) Rapportive doesn’t work.

I've never used rapportive, it sounds awesome. Bummer on this one.

5) You can’t easily get access to people’s emails. (Also fonts and formatting)

This one does bug me, because they've all become 3 clicks (or new shortcut keys to learn). An option to just always display these things would be good.... but I've evolved and learned the hotkeys.

In conclusion, I've also been a long time gmail user who got cranky at the fact that the new compose form forced me to change my habits. I learned hotkeys and feel it has made me more efficient. Since I try to spend as little time in life being cranky and optimize efficiency I evolved and moved on.

Full list of hotkeys: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#16

Post by kevingadd »

Blinkky wrote: post #2

I wouldn't consider myself a gmail power user, but I do use it as my every day email. I love the new updates. Most of the things that gmail makes hard (and when the author says hard he means an extra click) are things that are rarely, if ever, done by me. This is exactly how I think email should function, make the stuff you use most easy. The author mentions things like "It's hard to delete my signature." I've never…

When I'm trying to send an email, sure, I want the email client to get out of my way. But I also want to be certain that the email is going to the right person, and that the subject is correct (so they'll read it), etc. And those are all made harder by the new gmail ui.

The new gmail UI also uses less of my screen real estate (because it insists on being a tiny popup fake modal that I can't move) which means composing larger emails involves more scrolling. If I'm responding inline to quotes it involves EVEN MORE scrolling.

That modal is also glued to the bottom right of my screen, so if I had something there (like a floating window containing the email I was responding to), now I have to carefully resize my gmail window to get the modal into the right place - old fullscreen gmail had text start at the top left, so this wasn't a problem.

The new gmail compose mode also breaks the text caret in a way the old one didn't. I don't know if this is a gmail bug caused by using a custom edit control or a firefox bug or what, but it definitely tells me they didn't test it very thoroughly.

The new gmail is streamlined for particular purposes and not for others. You'd think that one of the biggest data companies in the universe would be able to gather actual data about how people use their software and ensure they aren't making it significantly worse to use for subsets of the customer base. Maybe this is what Google actually did, and they decided they don't care about the 1-10% of their users who use gmail for anything other than sending glorified SMS messages to people.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#17

Post by sp332 »

msrpotus wrote: post #11
sp332 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Gmail first launched, they made a big deal of the fact that their user testing revealed ~11 different types of user with distinct workflows. They made sure the Gmail interface supported all those workflows well. It seems like the new interface is going after just one or two, and making life harder for everyone else. I think I will switch back to a desktop email client for day-to-day use and only use the web inte…

Do you have a link? Curious to see what kind of user I am (I also generally like the new interface; seems perfectly fine for me).

Hm, looks like I misremembered and there were only 6 types. The exact types are proprietary info but the original author gives a few examples here: https://www.quora.com/Gmail/What-are-the-six-types-of-email-...

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#19

Post by kevingadd »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #15

I'm torn between strongly agreeing with these points and wanting to comment pointing out that none of them matter..... I hate change for change's sake, but the new gmail compose window has made me more efficient. It took some getting used to however. Responses to the points made in the article: 1) I can’t easily delete my signatures. Forget about deleting your sig and generally cleaning up email threads. Decent email…

Saying 'hit the big red compose button' totally misses the point of why subjects get edited.

If you'd ever participated in a discussion list, you'd know that sometimes a single discussion thread branches out into multiple smaller threads. The best way to handle this is to reply with a new subject so that threaded conversation views in email clients show it as a new thread, but all the participants stay on the reply-to list and the conversation history remains in the quotes.

Drag and drop from the address bar to insert a link? What is this, Mac OS 9? I've literally never observed a user drag and drop from the address bar. I know it works, but I'm a power user. Do you really think it makes sense to remove an obvious button for a common operation (inserting a link) just because you assume that users know how to drag-and-drop a text selection from a 16 pixel high rectangle?

Maybe all Google's user testers are dragging and dropping fiends so this actually is the reasoning behind it. I don't know how you would find precision drag-and-drop convenient on a typical laptop/chromebook touchpad, though.

Re: I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Blinkky wrote: post #2

I wouldn't consider myself a gmail power user, but I do use it as my every day email. I love the new updates. Most of the things that gmail makes hard (and when the author says hard he means an extra click) are things that are rarely, if ever, done by me. This is exactly how I think email should function, make the stuff you use most easy. The author mentions things like "It's hard to delete my signature." I've never…

[deleted]
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