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I feel like Gmail went from being Photoshop to Draw Something

taigeair.com

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

#191

Post by taigeair »

iamshs wrote: post #170
joering2 wrote: post #150

The biggest disappointment was to kill drag and drop attachments. Now you have to click the paper clip and pick the picture (one by one!) form your PC. In my opinion that's an indication that Google wants to discourage you from adding a lot of attachments to your mail because they don't make money off the bandwidth you are using. To me its another indication that Gmail at some point in near future may be doomed to su…

Bang On. I encountered this a week before too. I had to pick the pictures, drag and drop just in-lined them. On attaching the pictures, there was hardly any space in the window left to write any words. I am in transition to another email provider, but I am being forced to do so, and at a critical juncture for me personally.

Seriously I don't want to inline pictures sometimes. And guess what? If you delete it? You don't know if the picture is still attached because there is no visual feedback. Try it.

1. hit c 2. drag a picture into email 3. delete picture from email body 4. now i don't know if it's in attachment still or just removed from body.

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

#192

Post by taigeair »

mtalantikite wrote: post #83

Just make the switch to a desktop client. Lots of friends have been complaining about the new GMail UI and each time I recommend the same thing. I personally use Sparrow, but it seems like it has been abandoned since Google bought it.

But the cloud...

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

#194

Post by 3825 »

gcr wrote: post #122
kevinpet wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea what he was talking about until the replies. You and grandparent are wrong. Standard behavior on web forms is tab moves you to the next element. You are expecting gmail to act like a desktop app, and maybe you could make the argument that it should, but that's a different issue.

We can definitely make the case that it used to and that it doesn't anymore . Sending an email isn't like filling in several text boxes on a web form, it's composing/editing a lengthy message that often has proper formatting like indentation.

I actually use tab -> enter to send and I find it quite convenient. Why are people complaining about this when we've all tacitly admitted top posting?

IMO bigger problems are that email ought to be plain text by default and replies ought to go in the bottom (with three dots on the top if necessary).

Sorry if I made anyone mad. Now you know how I felt reading this post.

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

#196

Post by tomkarlo »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #158
tomkarlo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Photoshop has a totally different target market from Gmail, which is why the article's comparison is nonsensical if not entirely wrong. Gmail is designed for everyone and has to support the full spectrum of users, in particular the new ones (because they're the ones picking new email accounts - consider that they're partially trying to target people who still don't have email). Photoshop is designed for a ve…

>Gmail is designed for everyone and has to support the full spectrum of users, in particular the new ones (because they're the ones picking new email accounts - consider that they're partially trying to target people who still don't have email). If anything, the new Gmail with all the hiding and obfuscation going on is going affect the new users the most. The other users atleast know that something is possible and wi…

You're assuming that most users want to edit the subject of ongoing threads (and thereby break the thread.) I have my doubts it even occurs to most them. So not having that option visible makes sense. I understand what you're saying about hidden options being unknown, but generally overall cognitive load is one of the biggest issues for new users and one of the best ways to mitigate that is to remove visual complexity.

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

#197

Post by tomkarlo »

taigeair wrote: post #186
tomkarlo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty broad statement. It seems like what he's written is that it's gotten worse for someone with his use cases, which I'm not arguing (and I fall in that camp.) But we're also not representative of the average email user, which we sometimes have a tendency to forget when judging product changes.

@tomkarlo Photoshop is extremely customisable and full-featured which is what I was getting at. Draw Something is fun and light which works well as a mobile app. I don't know about the average email user but after 10,000+ hours of using email, I feel like I'm pretty proficient at email :)

Understood... but all your points are about the negatives of that, and none are about the positives.

It's pretty easy to come up with a bunch of arbitrary gripes about any major UX change. But you haven't made any effort to contemplate why these changes might make a lot of sense.

For example, you're complaining about the need to do two clicks to make a link, but it seems to me that 90% of the time people just paste in a URL and gmail deals with it properly. Separately entering a link and URL is more like writing HTML and I don't expect regular users do that... and frankly, I'd rather just have the URL anyway. If you knew that users were only using the "add link" icon maybe 1% of the time, wouldn't you move it down a level as well? Or just get rid of it?

I'm a super, super heavy Gmail user - I average ~6,000 emails a month received on my work account, and a smaller but similar flow on my personal gmail. I know and use the keyboard shortcuts. I generally find the mole and the new text formatting UX a bit annoying - but from a product usability perspective - not a design perspective - I can see why they make a lot of sense.

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

#198

Post by buo »

chris_j wrote: post #126
buo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me most about gmail is the flat conversations, where you can't see that a message was a reply to an email in the middle of a thread. It seems I'm almost alone thinking this way, though -- it's not a complaint I often hear from other people.

I agree; that's one thing that I notice, especially in an email chain with a lot of people in it. What would you like to see Gmail do about it?

Indenting and maybe vertical lines to help the reader figure out the threading would be an improvement. However, I don't think this is good enough in a long email chain. The way traditional email readers solve this is, of course, is with two views, one of threaded email subject and another for contents (http://www.davep.org/mutt/screenshots/). I don't think gmail will ever adopt this interface, though.

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

#200

Post by jpatokal »

mnicole wrote: post #125
tomkarlo wrote: post #70

Does anyone really think Photoshop is a good UX for mass consumption (which is obviously the target for Gmail)? I've been using it since version 2, and I think it's a great product, but for new users it's a miserably difficult product to learn, especially for any kind of casual use. There's a reason why users love apps like Draw Something or (more relevantly) Instagram or Paper. They're able to easily achieve the res…

> for new users it's a miserably difficult product to learn, especially for any kind of casual use. .. means the UX is bad. Just because it's an advanced tool doesn't mean it needs to be unreasonably difficult to wrap your head around. Pixelmator isn't as powerful, but the UX for most of what it does far exceeds Photoshop's similar features.

Discoverability != usability. Products designed for casual, first-time users must be discoverable (= it's easy to figure out how to do things), while tools for professionals repeating a workflow over and over must be usable (= fast to do what you want). Photoshop is usable but not discoverable, Gmail has to be both and it's a fine line to walk.
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