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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

#181

Post by nollidge »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #172
kamjam wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually find the redesign quite nice. I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it when I first switched to it, I "temporarily reverted back" which helped me "map" the old functionality to the new. Stuff the blogger is ranting about are all easily "fixed" back to the old look and style, but he hasn't gone to the trouble of looking. In fact, the 2nd comment on site tells you how. The demarkation thing, I haven't used the d…

I heavily disliked the new Gmail setup at first. But what it did do was kinda force me into learning all the keyboard shortcuts. (as I still don't know what half the buttons do...) Makes my workflow so much nicer. because of this, I do enjoy gmail even more. (I'm still not a fan, as I can't use my old custom color scheme, but that's another matter)

> I still don't know what half the buttons do...

Do you have JS disabled? They all have tooltips.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#182

Post by JackC »

forgotusername wrote: post #159
ajross wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing (nor, frankly, an unjustified one). What surprises me is that we haven't figured this out yet and rehash the same flame war every time. The desktop environments show this best: c.f. Gnome 3. Also Gnome 2. And Gnome…

> People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing I've had some thoughts on this recently, and wholeheartedly disagree. We spend aeons engineering stability into every other interface within a software ecosystem, since it's supposed to improve stability, reduce surprising breakage, improve engineer efficiency, discoverability,…

The outcry we hear over these changes isn't just bored people being picky, it's the sound of a trillion dying neurons in a million interconnected biological systems.

You seem to be suggesting that having to learn something new is like having your brain die. That seems inaccurate. Isn't learning a (not very) different interface more like having to exercise a muscle a little bit that you were hoping not to exercise? I mean, not a cool thing to do to your users if the new interface is worse, but not inherently a bad thing.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#183

Post by saturdaysaint »

Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble.

I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#184

Post by rubynerd »

adestefan wrote: post #151
mattmanser wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're begging the question. If we take what you say is true every redesign is good, which is patently false. A perfect example is the Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster. Also putting Vista in your list there, mmmmmm. Wasn't exactly a great redesign was it. The Google redesign is also pretty much a disaster.

Am I the only one that actually likes the ribbon? I can actually find the options I want to use in Office 10 instead of trying to dig through dozens of drop down menus.

I love it, I used to be on the fence until I discovered the magical ALT key

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#185

Post by suboptical »

e_proxus wrote: post #149
wavesplash wrote: post #24

I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes. In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme: http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic... Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing: http://jasoncrawford…

This user style puts the text back on the buttons: http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons...

There's an option in general settings to add text button labels.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#186

Post by jim-greer »

zerostar07 wrote: post #173
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…

I for one still get confused with their icons. I mean, Archive doesn't look at all like archive, Spam looks like a quota warning error, "move to" looks more like "view another folder", and the lack of borders makes my eyes wander outside of the text all the time. And I have to agree about the uselessness of the importance icon. All my mail is marked as important, yes, i know that, how does this help me? It's more use…

I really like the importance system. My inbox is in 3 sections: Important, Starred, and Everything Else. I look a Everything Else once per day and can typically blow it all away without reading in a couple of clicks.

edit: As for knowing what you've acted on, I always archive an email when replying. There's a Labs feature called 'Send & Archive', which makes this easy.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#187

Post by nollidge »

initself wrote: post #46
jrockway wrote: post #39

I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.

I use it without problems too, and so does the author, but our eyes are not happy and our brains are less relaxed. We never used importance and we don't want it cluttering up our stars. We need visual queues, like lines.

You can turn it off. Under Inbox in Settings.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#188

Post by OpinKerfiBjarni »

sdoering wrote: post #148
OpinKerfiBjarni wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. The minimalism of the front page was, in the early days, a point of pride and something that engineers fought for (note: I worked for Google for 3 years on a team with a fair number of old-timers). I'm failing to come up with a link at the moment, but I remember a widely circulated bit of folklore about how an unnamed engineer within Google set up a cronjob that anonymously e-mailed the entire team a s…

And even this seems to me to be not quite right. There was a talk, Marissa Meyer gave on Velocity '09: http://blip.tv/oreilly-velocity-conference/velocity-09-maris... Just watch from 1:00 to 2:00 -> One Minute will answer the question. Here she tells the story, how the first Google Design came to live. It is quite interesting. It seems, that minimalism wasn't a rational choice and that it came to stay only, because t…

Yeah, it's really the last point that I was making - that it was a point of pride to keep it small, even after there was all sorts of "stuff" that could be added to it. The fact that it was small to begin with was probably a combination of luck and intuition.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#189

Post by Duff »

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…

I'd argue that something has radically changed within Google.

Personally, I don't mind the new interface that much -- once it's in compact view and you change to a darker theme. They did make some significant improvements for folks who live in multiple Google Accounts, and I think the Google+ integration is pretty slick.

But, there is no way that incessant testing produced metrics leading to the default white-on-white theme and non-compact view configuration. Maybe they surveyed people with poorly chosen questions or did something else that caused the testing to fail. But they didn't do a meaningful usability test that involved using a mail app.

GMail originally moved email UI forward with the conversation view -- I think they saw this new look as a similar thing, and pushed it out.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#190

Post by crazygringo »

anthonyb wrote: post #156
DavidAbrams wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a very common UI mechanism on the web. The alternative is to have a bunch of handles and buttons plastered over everything. Most desktop UIs are the same - there's all sorts of right click options on various UI elements, and have been for years. Drag and drop, drag to select, dragging stuff into your recycle bin or onto another folder to copy them. How are you supposed to know that? By experimenting with your…

But it's one thing to learn a UI for your whole OS. You learn it once, and you're done.

For websites, it shouldn't be necessary. I personally abhor the "hidden until hover" buttons that are becoming increasingly popular. I spent ten minutes trying to discover why GitHub had removed it's "edit issue" functionality until I realized that I had to hover over the issue text for the button to appear in the corner. It's horrible.

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