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GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

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Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#101

Post by option_greek »

DavidAbrams wrote: post #50
jdietrich wrote: post #19

It'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. U…

OK. I'll call them inept and pan their design based on months of USE. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one example needed to prove the failure of this new design: http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...

Ya, one of the worst changes of the new design. You have to hover over edge of the last folder to see all of them. They could have used simple accordian instead of all this mess. The new Gmail causes me nausea when ever I use it.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#102

Post by option_greek »

zmmmmm wrote: post #33

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as…

In other words, the new design looks like its designed by machines in the matrix film. Everything uniform and soul less.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#103

Post by thezilch »

DavidAbrams wrote: post #97
thezilch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click the square/arrow to the right of any label, there are a plethora of options, including when and why a label should be shown at all costs. Frankly, the label functionality that exists now, in the redesign, is amazing.

Nope. Screen shot: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7117915617_c0c8cab3fc.jpg

Ok, upon closer inspection of your original screenshot, it appears you need to hover the padding-area between "Chat" and the border line above -- a separator between labels and the chat modules. You should notice a resize cursor and an ellipsis icon; this separator is movable and reveal more of your labels, without having to hover the labels area to reveal them.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#104

Post by theootz »

Pretty horrible list IMO...

1) Try a different theme, it may help if it really affects you that much. But this is the only one I somewhat agree with as being possibly an issue; but nothing I really thought of when first looking at the new UI

2) The marker is more than far enough away to make it easy to scan through IMO. This feels far too subjective to just throw out and be like "yea this is definitely a bad change" without doing some testing first. Either way, you can disable this from settings. (Disable snippets iirc?)

3) This too can be disabled: go to settings and change it to text labels instead of graphical labels?

As much as I used to hate the new look too, I think it's improved enough since its first iteration to get out of the way and let me do my thing. Though, I still REALLY hate the fact that you can't click on the "Google" logo at the top left to go back to the main page for whatever application you happen to be at. I have no idea why they would remove that...

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#105

Post by option_greek »

andrewfelix wrote: post #35
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #8

There'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…

>These designers are doing whatever makes them look I doubt Google would let a group of self interested ego fueled creative's override rational principal and analysis. Especially considering this is a flagship Google product with 350M users. >On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. I'm a designer. I've never properly criti…

Haven't you faced any problem with the toolbar buttons ? they are all lumps of coal with minor variations!

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#106

Post by rkudeshi »

DavidAbrams wrote: post #95
anthonyb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to Settings > Labels, then pick the ones that you want to show. Pity your "months of USE" didn't take you that far...

WRONG. All of my labels/mailboxes are set to show: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7117915617_c0c8cab3fc.jpg Any other wrong advice you'd like to try to contradict me with?

You can hide the chat box. Look for a button at the bottom center of the sidebar (so lower left of the entire screen).

That should show you as many labels as possible. Because of the new multi-panel approach, you'll have to scroll down the sidebar if you have more labels than fit (like an iframe).

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#107

Post by nullflux »

theoj wrote: post #76
zmmmmm wrote: post #33

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as…

>> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to spe…

The solution is to learn color and how it works. Start with something like color theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#108

Post by kluge »

twoodfin wrote: post #17

I 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.

The best part of it is having Gmail on Android notify you only about important messages. It's great to get notifications about emails from friends about things going on tonight, but not get bothered by email list messages that can wait.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#109

Post by ekianjo »

commandar wrote: post #75
ekianjo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard the same thing about Google before, but obviously there seems to be a change. The old Google would not "push" a new interface when there is so much resistance to the new design. I may be suffering from a sample bias, but no Gmail user around me likes the new design. If they did test this stuff, maybe they cherry-picked their target population to get the results they wanted to please the designers. Who kn…

Sample size of one, but I love the new Gmail UI, personally.

Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers, if possible with a large enough user base to avoid the sample-size bias ? I'd be interested to know if there were. That way, we could really compare if most people have a problem or not with the Gmail UI.

At least, we can see there was a significant increase of "Gmail interface sucks" articles when the new UI came out. That has to represent some part of the users, to the least.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#110

Post by ekianjo »

reneherse wrote: post #86
ekianjo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard the same thing about Google before, but obviously there seems to be a change. The old Google would not "push" a new interface when there is so much resistance to the new design. I may be suffering from a sample bias, but no Gmail user around me likes the new design. If they did test this stuff, maybe they cherry-picked their target population to get the results they wanted to please the designers. Who kn…

To give a counter example to your first point regarding the "old Google": A year or two ago they did a major redesign of the Google News page. There was a huge amount of negative and often thoughtful feedback in the user discussion forums, but it was all seemingly ignored, and the new interface was implemented ostensibly without change. The page has since changed again, I believe, and it's even more of a mess. Scanni…

Thanks for the addition. Well when I refer to the "old Google" I am not sure where to draw the line, it may have started earlier than the recent G+ integration anyway. It has more to do with my perception of an "old Google" organization which used to be open to user feedback rather than the more recent one, blatantly pushing changes with seemingly no passion about their established user base opinion.

I may be wrong. To confirm whether things changed or not, we'd need to get Google insiders to speak out on that subject.

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