I have no problem with the new Gmail. After the initial adjustment period, I find myself enjoying it more than the old version. I have developed a reflex for using the buttons that didn't exist with the text versions. It just happened.
GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
21–30 of 234 posts
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#22brilliant hack to re-enable reverting to the old gmail UI:
http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerj...
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#23Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#24I 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.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#25Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz"). (I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)
Eh, I think Yahoo Mail was upgraded a year or so ago. I prefer it to GMail.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#26It'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…
You're probably thinking of Doug Bowman's classic "Goodbye Google" post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
I think two things are entirely possible here: One, that in reaction to Bowman's high-profile indictment of Google's design culture, there has been a shift over the past few years toward Apple-like, auteur-driven design at Google, that was misapplied in this case, or (I think more likely), every detail of the new Gmail UI was extensively tested by itself, but there was no final arbiter to say "you know what? This one part sucks; let's change it despite the data."
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#27I always have though GMail is subpar at best when it comes to interface. I feel no desire to justify this opinion, just my personal feelings.
Same here. I have always preferred native mail clients (originally Thunderbird, and now Mail.app on OS X/iOS).
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#28It'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 thought the general consensus was that all the Google usability testing actively resulted in bad designs.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#29It'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 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 knows.
Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism
#30I've long solved the Gmail web interface issues by accessing it only via IMAP. On the rare occasions when I have to use the website or Android Gmail clients they seem so unproductive to me. I think it is an information density thing - my desktop client (Thunderbird these days) is able to do a far better job of showing me more information at once. It also has the ability to manage state a lot better than web apps so my different panes can have differing contexts.