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Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

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Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#111
post #90
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jason Cornwell is a stupendous example of the Peter Principle.

Let's not get personal. There are lots of ways this kind of thing can happen.

How is it personal to mention the individual who is responsible for the change?

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#112

Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me to Google from other services years ago. Two examples: - maps: new interface is so terrible that I am activel…

Youtube:

* Buffering was nerfed/broken some time ago. I can no longer watch 720p+ videos on youtube at all.

* Changing video quality now has a long and unavoidable delay, and often fails outright.

* Google are evidently uneasy about the profile name that I signed up with, and have been repeatedly nudging me to change it. I don't know how to reassure them about my choice.

* Advertising. Everywhere.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#113
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution. Steve Jobs could probably have…

What a load of crap. Plenty of untasteful and inconsistent crap had come out of Apple, under Jobs; it's painfully easy to find examples [0]. Everyone is going to have their opinions, of course, but the compose, unlabeled / iconography buttons, detractors of WYSIWYG emails, etc are _not_ disasters for myself and many others. [0] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/06/on-ui-inconsistency-in-ios-5/

unlabeled / iconography buttons

How do you know what anything does with graphical-only buttons, in Gmail compose UI, Android copy/paste UI, etc., without tapping everything at least once and potentially losing data?

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#115
What gives me anxiety is complaining about minor UX changes for a class-leading free product on a site that's called "Hacker News". I hate to get all old-fogey but Hacker News has really turned into "the random opinions of people in the startup world". I learn a lot less on this site than I used to.

Sorry to the OP, it's not your fault that you provided content the community likes and I have no personal issue with you.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#116
I accidentally deleted an email thread the other day. How? When replying in Gmail, there's a little button below the editing area that has a trash can icon and will discard a draft. There's a button with an identical icon on the same screen, just above the editing area that will delete the email/thread. I don't know much about design, but this strikes me as an extremely poor interface.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#117
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload If only someone had invented a windowing GUI. My main issues, now I've set the default to fullish screen, is it's more like Outlook: editing the To/CC fields is annoying, and it wants you to always quote the entire email. I await a Chrome extension to let me live in the past with people who knew how to use compute…

>If only someone had invented a windowing GUI. At work I have to use a mac, it's a PITA to manage multiple non fullscreen windows on it. There is also a fair amount of screen estate lost per window.

I use Slate for this: https://github.com/jigish/slate

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#118
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: maps, you can revert to "classic" by clicking on the gear.

For now.

Hopefully, it will work like Google Groups. Meaning that for the next two or three years, we will be told that "The old Google Maps will be going away soon," but it won't actually happen.

It's so nice of Google to give their users so much advance warning of incoming suckage. I guess that's part of the whole don't-be-evil mission statement. Kudos to them.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#119
post #14

My problem with that is people who write emails in full screen windows end up writing poorly formatted emails (very long paragraphs) because they are now composing their emails with 300 columns. Besides, a CEO that can't focus on writing a message unless they don't have any other distraction on their screen should probably work on their focus skills.

Besides, a CEO that can't focus on writing a message unless they don't have any other distraction on their screen should probably work on their focus skills.

Also, they're holding it wrong. Right?

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#120
post #93

Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me to Google from other services years ago. Two examples: - maps: new interface is so terrible that I am activel…

There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution. Steve Jobs could probably have…

So why isn't any telling Larry that this idea isn't working that well? I thought Google was the kind of place the higher ups could tell the CEO that his idea wasn't so hot?

Fwiw, this search for 'beautiful consistent look across products' doesn't seem to be confined to Google. Yahoo Groups had a decent interface till they introduced a completely broken, unusable new look named "Neo". Just thinking about how unusable this made using Groups, makes me angry.

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