GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism • Hacker News Board

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#121

Post by thezilch » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 8:58 AM UTC

DavidAbrams wrote: post #116

thezilch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You've never hovered over the chat area? Nonetheless, the bar could could probably use a hint when also hovering the labels area. I'm still unsure how you have written off the designers as simply inept. I could take down any UI with such an attitude.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#122

Post by amouat » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:03 AM UTC

seldo wrote: post #96

furyofantares wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think the possibilities are that either google ignored the data or the data is wrong with no affordance to the possibility that you are wrong?

When something is as viscerally, obviously bad to me as the new GMail UI, I go with my gut. Google has no track record of great UI that would make me question that feeling. They built the world's simplest home page not because of some profound respect for minimalism; they just didn't have anything else to put on it.

That's not fair, they could easily have overloaded the home page with junk at any point.

They just realised that users came to google to perform a single, clearly defined task and decided the home page should reflect that.

I wouldn't argue it was "respect for minimalism" but it was respect for functional simplicity.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#123

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:03 AM UTC

reneherse wrote: post #120

ekianjo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems that the design elements were built progressively, while adding new features, by getting user feedback on what works and what did not. That was partly the reason why "Google Labs" existed in the first place.

I think there was a clear line drawn at least with the G+ integration, since they started consolidating the appearance of all services under the same UI and same color codes. There is a now a clear "design vision" in Google (even if it clearly sucks bad) and it's clearly not as Engineers-driven/Fonctionality-driven as before. Having Icons without text next to it is not just a style issue: it's a well known flaw in terms of usability. Everyone knows icons+text are superior to icons only. Especially when your icons are dark grey on light grey background. No differentiation whatsoever. I can't believe someone was actually paid to do this.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#124

Post by el_presidente » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:24 AM UTC

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…

There is absolutely no way they tested their design on anything smaller than a 15" laptop. I don't need to see their test data to figure that out; loading Reader or Gmail on my 10" netbook is good enough.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#125

Post by lani » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:25 AM UTC

thank gawd - someone needed to say that . we're all helpless with google's arm-twisting us to accept the new email-look, or going back, forcing youtube users to start using a gmail id ..

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#126

Post by ragmondo » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:32 AM UTC

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...

This is my major gripe as well ...

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#127

Post by antihero » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:51 AM UTC

andrewfelix wrote: post #112

option_greek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup plus you don't need the precursor of knowing the English language.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#128

Post by jasonkester » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 9:59 AM UTC

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…

The worst offence of this type I've come across is in JetBrains' latest crop of IDEs.

In WebStorm, they completely removed the scrollbar in the code editor, and replaced it with this "hidden until you mouseover it" slider thing. That means you have no visual cue where you are in a document, scroll-wise. And no way to quickly grab the scrollbar with the mouse since you have to hover and wait on the right edge of the screen before you can see where you're headed.

Making it worse, they have (normally) really useful gutter over there that displays colored bars describing the health of your code. Those are cool, but they now live on top of the scroll bar so even when its visible it's still pretty hard to find it.

Compare that to their (awesome) ReSharper plugin for VS.NET that preserves the original scrollbar and adds that helpful gutter bar next to it. You can quickly see the health of your code AS WELL AS where you're scrolled in the document. Perfect.

I filed a bug against WebStorm about this and had it immediately closed as "by design". Worse UI. Intentional. And not even a setting you can uncheck to fix it.

I actually uninstalled my paid copy of WebStorm as a result. It'd be an awesome product, but all its advantages are wiped out by not being able to navigate around files at times when I have a mouse in my hand. One bad UI choice to turn a good IDE into shelfware.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#129

Post by adrianhoward » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 10:12 AM UTC

Now, personally speaking, I don't like a bunch of the changes (those damn icons being the most annoying - and yes I know you can change them to text and I have :-). I can certainly criticise some stuff that gets in the way of my personal workflow. But hey - I'm not the 'average' GMail user. Expecting Google for optimise for me is daft.

A couple of random thoughts from usability tests I've done over the years:

* People are treating the changes to gmail in isolation. Google has changed and integrated design over all of their products. Some parts of a system can get "worse", but still help the overall system get "better". I've seen this when we culled some specialised hi-density layouts on a particular part of a larger system that pissed off some expert users who spent all their time there - but opened up the functionality to be used by a much larger population who were more familiar with the "normal" look.

* People don't know what Google is optimising for. Usability and usability testing isn't necessarily about "making things nice for the user". It's about meeting the business goal. For example I've seen users hate the fact we took some layout and colour preferences away from them, despite the fact that overall satisfaction went up, and efficiency increased even for the users who hated the change.

* I 100% guarantee that the people commenting here are not "normal" as far as Google is concerned. Does it matter if the geeks like me hate that they can see less e-mail at a time, if the other 99% of the market is jumping for joy that they're not repeatedly clicking on the wrong e-mail? Sometimes you just can't make everybody happy - so have to make a decision over which audience you want to be happy. You will generally have a more successful product if 60% of your audience goes "yay" rather than 100% going "meh".

* I spend a bunch of my time talking to "normal" users. I've noticed the general reaction to the new GMail be very different from the general reaction here. They either liked it, or just not noticed/expressed an opinion. I suspect Google cares about that user group more than it does me :-)

Also, and this is complete guesswork on my part, this feels like a first stage to me. Currently the various apps are very lightly integrated with a mostly pure visual design makeover. I wouldn't be surprised to see more functional integration appear over the next year or two as more people perceive the various Google apps and systems as an integral "thing".

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#130

Post by option_greek » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 10:15 AM UTC

antihero wrote: post #127

andrewfelix wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup plus you don't need the precursor of knowing the English language.

My problem is not with the lack of text. It's not always possible to include text with icons. What I find depressing is the lack of color. There must be a reason humans evolved to see color and these monochromatic icons cause nothing but mental overhead. They are also pretty poor in details. I wish at least the spam button is red/yellow.