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Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

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Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#121

Post by encoderer »

thezilch wrote: post #98
pg wrote: 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/

If you're going to be so belligerent, at least use an example of something that wasn't developed while Jobs was disengaged and on his deathbed.

More importantly, though, I love that you read 2 paragraphs and then blew your top ("what a load of crap" -- really?) over a parenthetical comment that was already qualified with a "probably."

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#122

Post by jlgreco »

plorkyeran wrote: post #66
ihnorton wrote: post #27

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…

Everything about the new Google Maps besides the maps themselves is so mindbogglingly bad that I have no idea how they thought it was ready for public consumption. It seems to be missing most of the features of the classic Google Maps, and those that are present are far harder to use. The UI for the public transit schedules is pretty much the only thing that seems like it could be an improvement once I get used to it…

I can't even figure out how to get a permalink in Maps anymore. Nightmare.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#123

Post by cdash »

lingben wrote: post #87
molecule wrote: post #8

To avoid being distracted by the gmail inbox and to have a clean composition interface, I always keep this URL bookmarked, and it still works w/ the new compose: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailt...

not to be snarky but you know, this is 2013, not 1999. If the largest and best funded company can't get something as simple as email right, then they should just pack up and go home. Or at least fire their whole UX/UI department and start fresh. By right, I mean a clean, simple interface that you don't need to judiciously learn over dozens of hours of frustrating trial and error or by googling in support forums. The…

Thats funny, cause they got it right for me.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#124

Post by brian_cloutier »

nitrogen wrote: post #113
thezilch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If it's any consolation, if you long-hold an Action Item (anything in the top or botton bars, including the copy/paste UI) in android a tooltip will appear explaining what the button does.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#125

Post by ww520 »

The new GMail Compose is a horrible horrible interface. It's bordering unusable. After looking around to disable it without any success, I started looking for alternatives. I ended up installing Thunderbird and couldn't be happier! With IMAP I can run Thunderbird on different machines and got the benefit of moving from machine to machine and still be able to access mail accounts.

Thunderbird is the way to go!

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#126

Post by nnethercote »

The window size and position is fine; I like being able to easily refer to other emails.

It's what they've done to the editing that bugs me.

- It encourages top-posting. To bottom-post, you have to click the "..." button, and then remove the two blank lines at the top.

- Fast selection of text with shift-Pg{Up,Dn} no longer works.

- Firefox's "It's All Text" add-on, which lets you drop into a real editor to edit a textbox, no longer works with it.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#127

Post by thezilch »

nitrogen wrote: post #113
thezilch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I use keyboard coords to navigate and operate most facets of GMail, and all of the buttons have a tooltip, distinctive icons, and have the ability to undo. I'd be willing to eat crow if there were actually a study showing that users of 2-3 icons without labels don't know their purpose after the first couple uses. Instead, we get a bunch of parroting about how Google and Page have lost their way -- nothing scientific.

As for Android, sure there is no undo, and I wasn't really speaking for Android, but I'd, again, be really surprised if the cut/copy/paste is statistically confusing. I'd only suggest the paste option only be offered in the context-menu above the selection and not also next to the cut/copy icons. I'd also argue that it's really unlikely I'd be doing anything with an Android device that isn't repeatable with little effort or would be undoable and before I possibly had to cut my teeth once or twice. I think iOS did a better job here, as Android offers no means of backing out a change.

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#129

Post by general_failure »

pg wrote: post #93
ihnorton wrote: post #27

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…

This was a good comment but the Steve Jobs bit was unnecessary (because people like me will get distracted and flame you for it).

Re: Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

#130

Post by general_failure »

lingben wrote: post #87
molecule wrote: post #8

To avoid being distracted by the gmail inbox and to have a clean composition interface, I always keep this URL bookmarked, and it still works w/ the new compose: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailt...

not to be snarky but you know, this is 2013, not 1999. If the largest and best funded company can't get something as simple as email right, then they should just pack up and go home. Or at least fire their whole UX/UI department and start fresh. By right, I mean a clean, simple interface that you don't need to judiciously learn over dozens of hours of frustrating trial and error or by googling in support forums. The…

Who is jason?
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