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GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
11–20 of 234 posts
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#12This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors
They completely REVERSED it!!
Previously:
Blue - No new message
Orange - New chat message
Now:
Blue - New chat message
Black - No new message
Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#13There's something deeper going on here: The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements…
Sound similar to the "designing for the industry, not people" syndrome seen in the world of architecture discussed here: http://www.shareable.net/blog/architectural-myopia-designing...
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#14I agree with #3. I have a lot of problems deciphering the icons, in the browser client and the ipad client.
They added a setting to change the icons to text: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-bu...
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#15I totally agree with you. Another specific change that is hard to defend is the new "..." three dots to expand hidden parts of the conversation from previous messages. It used to be text that was clear and large enough to click on. Apparently the Gmail team hasn't learned about Fitts' Law, and the new target is pretty hard to hit with a mouse.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#16This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors They completely REVERSED it!! Previously: Blue - No new message Orange - New chat message Now: Blue - New chat message Black - No new message Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.
On the topic of bad colors, I like facebook's old colors of "offline" and "online": A green circle for online. a Gray-green circle for offline. On a screen with bad gamma, they looked almost exactly the same.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#17I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#18Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz").
(I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#19It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width.
Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster.
Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be very reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#20I overwhelmingly agree as a UX guy w/the comments in this thread about the poor choices from a design perspective.
But since this new design rolled into beta I've found myself slowly depending on Gmail more and more vs. my desktop client.
I don't know why but the "lack" of proper interface design here makes it feel blazing FAST to me, which is really the #1 thing I care about when trying to keep up with a slew of email.
I never had that sense in the previous version.
Anybody else?