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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

#191

Post by Drbble »

eridius wrote: post #94
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?

A third option is they tested each individual change in isolation, and then grabbed all of the high-performing changes and lumped them together. Just because the individual changes may have been improvements within the context of the old UI doesn't mean they're still good once put together with all the other changes. That said, I have trouble believing that changing the buttons from labels to icons could have possibl…

Maybe Gmail 's spam detection is too good. It's the octagonal "stop sign" icon.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#193

Post by Duff »

ajross wrote: post #43
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…

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…

The flames die down when people realize that there are design improvements that help them down the road.

OS X Finder UI is a mess anyway, so changes that make it easier for non-technical folk are probably net positives.

I don't have a good public example in mind, but the users at my employer often flip with volcanic rage when applications are changed -- even godawful VB5 legacy apps. Usually you can discern the "I hate change, and am typing up a memo of complaint" arguments versus "you made things worse" arguments based on who is complaining.

With respect to GMail, when people like pg who get the big picture are saying that the UI sucks, it probably sucks.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#194

Post by Drbble »

ekianjo wrote: post #123
reneherse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "desi…

We use testing to discover when what "everyone knows" is wrong.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#195

Post by ajross »

mattmanser wrote: post #150
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…

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.

I think, given the diversity of opinions in the responses to your post, you might want to rethink some of this. I certainly said no such thing. Some redesigns are "good", and some redesigns are "bad". But that decision is personal and subjective. You can't change a UI without annoying someone somewhere. And any UI that lots of people use regularly (gmail, Office and desktops are all great example) is going to have a metric ton of loud complainers every time they change.

And that applies whether or not the change has merit. It's inherent in the process. So any analysis of a UI that starts with an "I HATE THE CHANGES!" blog post is flawed and (in the scientific sense) biased. Show some testing, write your own rant, or just sit tight.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#196

Post by ImprovedSilence »

nollidge wrote: post #181
ImprovedSilence wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fair enough. I guess my point was, I learned the keyboard shortcuts for those actions, so I never need to use the buttons. It was an exaggeration, the trash can icon isn't hard to figure out. But I don't even see them anymore, it's the "I don't use it, so I don't see it" blindness.

I highly recommend picking up the keyboard shortcuts, they are so amazingly fantastic. deleting, reading, labeling, archiving, marking important/unread. they all work wonders.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#197

Post by BrandonM »

DavidAbrams wrote: post #52
aresant wrote: post #20

I 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 ema…

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…

GMail is so much faster all the way around if you use keyboard shortcuts. Because I'm rarely using the mouse and the keyboard shortcuts don't change, the experience feels largely the same to me.

In the case of labels especially, gl followed by a few characters from the label, then Enter gets me to the label page before I would even have time to figure out where my mouse cursor is.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#198

Post by seldo »

OpinKerfiBjarni wrote: post #188
sdoering wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The fact that it was small to begin with was probably a combination of luck and intuition.

Which was the point I was making.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#199

Post by adrianbravo »

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,…

It's an email redesign, not the Holocaust.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#200

Post by brown9-2 »

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.

It's certainly possible that this is the reason, but I agree with the author that it's arrogance to assume that disliking a change can always be attributed to change aversion.
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