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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

#111

Post by jaredsohn »

ekianjo wrote: post #109
commandar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "Gma…

The general problem with this is you don't know if you're sampling fairly or not. Perhaps the easiest way to do this (although there may be a sampling bias) would be to search twitter for 'gmail', 'gmail sucks' 'like gmail', etc. to get an idea of what people who tweet about it think.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#112

Post by andrewfelix »

option_greek wrote: post #105
andrewfelix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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!

Took me literally a few minutes to adjust. Like a lot of UI elements the association of function is formed over time. Everything I do in Gmail is second nature to me now and the UI doesn't impede much if anything. I do wish email attachments would appear on the right of the email thread.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#113

Post by ubernostrum »

thezilch wrote: post #103
DavidAbrams wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Important tip based on what I see in this thread from multiple people:

If the response is "oh, no problem, just try to find this button, or hover on this very small area to trigger a non-obvious behavior"... we're probably not talking about good UX.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#114

Post by iaskwhy »

jsherry wrote: post #47

"I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily." You can remove the importance markers: Settings > Inbox tab > Importance Markers.

And there is also a setting for having text labels in buttons instead of icons.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#115

Post by drostie » 

    > I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers
    > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the
    > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody
    > could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it
    > because it was unfamiliar.
It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar belongs to this tab. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing.

I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is not the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those cannot be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#116

Post by DavidAbrams »

thezilch wrote: post #103
DavidAbrams wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would I move the cursor to an area in which there are no visible controls?

Thanks for your response, but this is shitty UI. Is the user supposed to sweep the entire screen, pixel by pixel, looking for Easter eggs?

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#117

Post by DavidAbrams »

rkudeshi wrote: post #106
DavidAbrams wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Thanks for the chat-box info.

This is more bad (Easter-egg) UI: There's no visible control next to "chat" (or any of the other labels) until you've already rolled the cursor over it. Why would the user roll the cursor over there, if there are no visible controls?

It's incredible that we're LOSING common UI sense at such a rate.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#118

Post by Gigablah »

anthonyb wrote: post #60
DavidAbrams wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. The asinine hiding of most of your mail folders makes it way slower to navigate. And there's no indication that they exist. No control with which to reveal them. This regression in UI standards that evolved and stayed in place for decades reveals that there aren't enough decent designers to do the required work today. And they don't have even a moderate level of experience or common sense, or they wouldn't make…

Click on the little arrow next to your folder/label. Under the 'In label list:' part, select 'Show'. Now your folders appear all the time. Also, you can click the "More" at the bottom to expand it. Why is that so hard? EDIT: No really - why is it so hard? Better than 90% of the complaining on this page could be solved just by spending a few minutes going through settings, tweaking GMail to your liking. There's even a…

This entire discussion is a nice demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect -- everyone's suddenly a designer with more skills and common sense than Google staff.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#119

Post by saint-loup »

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.

I'm a sucker for clean layouts with a lot of whitespace, gradient-free themes and monochrome icons, but here there's just too much space wasted, especially with the bars in the upper part. That's my only real gripe with this Gmail and Reader redesign.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#120

Post by reneherse »

ekianjo wrote: post #110
reneherse wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

My history of closely scrutinizing Google products doesn't go back very far, so I couldn't say where the line between their old and new approach might be drawn. It also might be something that varied between product teams...

There is another possibility, that direct (verbal) user feedback is discounted as being "anecdotal" and not included when making "data driven" design decisions. But as you mentioned, this is all speculation without an insider's POV.

My intuition, however, is that their data-driven technique over-optimizes the various minutiae while allowing broader flaws to persist. I'd chalk that up to a lack of design vision to guide the testing.

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