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How to cope with the Gmail redesign

jasoncrawford.org

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Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#71

Post by jaredsohn »

taeric wrote: post #69
mattmanser wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/facepalm. So you've got no qualification whatsoever talking about the new interface as you avoid it entirely. What I love most is sometimes the important buttons are red and in the top left. But sometimes they are gray and in the bottom right. Which will it be today? Flip a coin! Consistency is an alien word to the Google Design Team.

I'm not sure I follow. I don't avoid it. They just happened to have not changed the way I interact with it. I confess I did find my old theme a little more pleasant to deal with, but I'm already at the point where I don't remember it anymore. I'm curious what "important buttons" you are referring to. I'm also curious how folks that get this worked up over their email client don't go into shock when they get a new car…

When you get a new car, that's because of a choice you are making or a consequence of your actions (such as if the previous one was totaled.) When a website that a person frequents which "seems to work fine the way it is" changes, people get worked up because they see the change as unnecessary.

Similarly, if you are a developer, you might feel the same way if the company you work at randomly decides to switch bug trackers or wikis, when the new ones aren't really any better than before.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#72

Post by andrewfelix »

mattmanser wrote: post #57
andrewfelix wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>large companies can't actually realise that their design departments are not doing a great job There are obviously a lot of unhappy users with legitimate gripes. But Google would probably be looking at the growth of Gmail to validate what ever the design department is doing. That growth is pretty impressive.

Growth? Gmail grew 3 or 4 years ago. I wouldn't recommend Gmail to anyone now, it's just another Hotmail type service, there's nothing special or good about Gmail anymore. What really surprised me is how few of my friends get the 'conversation' view even in 2012. After too many awkward conversations and now their 'we've got absolutely no design skills and can't design for shit' redesign, I'm just shrugging when peopl…

According to Google(obviously not an unbiased source) Gmail gained around 90M users between 2011 and 2012.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#73

Post by andrewfelix »

twelvechairs wrote: post #58
andrewfelix wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>large companies can't actually realise that their design departments are not doing a great job There are obviously a lot of unhappy users with legitimate gripes. But Google would probably be looking at the growth of Gmail to validate what ever the design department is doing. That growth is pretty impressive.

> But Google would probably be looking at the growth of Gmail to validate what ever the design department is doing. If past performance is your primary way of to 'validate' anything, you obviously have a very poor understanding of the subject matter and are going to lag behind those who do.

I'm not entirely sure what you're stating here. Businesses shouldn't look at past performances in order to make judgements about future performance? And those who ignore it will have an edge?

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#74

Post by chimeracoder »

Jach wrote: post #32
hrktb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, if you don't like one you can get any other that fits your bill.

You can do this with Gmail just fine since it supports both pop3 and imap out. But I join the chuckling at the notion that "this demonstrates gmail's flexibility". If it was really flexible and customizable, I would still have the old theme.

> You can do this with Gmail just fine since it supports both pop3 and imap out.

Gmail's IMAP works, though it's had a number of minor-but-irritating bugs for years (these bugs even affect the official applications too). I wish they'd fix them - I get that it's not in their interest to support nonstandard clients for which they receive no ad revenue, but that's no excuse here, because they still cause some of the same problems on the Android and Blackberry apps.

This article, dated February 2008 (four years ago!) is just as relevant today as it was then. The duplication of messages with broken synchronization is what bothers me the most, as I use offlineimap to handle my mail: http://weblog.timaltman.com/archive/2008/02/24/gmails-buggy-...

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#75

Post by ditojim »

sho_hn wrote: post #7
TamDenholm wrote: post #2

Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.

> I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation That made me chuckle, using a desktop email app. Funny/curious/thought-provoking how different standards apply to web apps still.

You're missing out on a ton of great Gmail features if you are using a desktop mail client. Integrated hangout/voice /text chat, phone, conversation view, the social pane with contextual information..the list goes on.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#76

Post by chimeracoder »

ck2 wrote: post #5
rachelbythebay wrote: post #3

You can talk IMAP/POP and SMTP, and you get to control your own user interface, or you can talk HTTP, HTML, and JS and abdicate control to someone else. I fell into that trap myself. I was a heavy user of Gmail for about four years, and when they started changing things and told me "only 0.07% of users use that feature we just removed", it was too late. This mayhem ruined "the cloud" for me ... and I used to help run…

What UI do you use? I probably going to use newest Thunderbird when I leave gmail.

For GUI clients, Thunderbird is the best I've seen, followed by Evolution (back when I used it, anyway).

Though if you're open to a ncurses-based client, I use mutt. The #1 reason I switched to it (instead of any other client) when the new Gmail design was released was because it opens almost instantaneously. It's a subtle thing, but not having to leave my inbox open all the time and being able to open it in a split second when I need to really helps my workflow.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#77

Post by MaysonL »

adgar wrote: post #29

This is more like a "how to revert to 2006 GMail" list. I mean, he even goes out of his way to turn off Priority Inbox and important markers. That has nothing to do with the redesign - it's just turning off year+ old features, which is what a good portion of the post is. Luckily for the author, options exist to turn off all the features that have been released in the past many years. Of course, there's some apportion…

Priority Inbox is Google'S broken idea of what is important to me and what is not: it's ugly, distracting, and worse than without it.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#78

Post by eternalban »

chintan wrote: post #70
eternalban wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html

Thanks for this gem! Did they forgot to change this view or G-Plusification will kill this as well?

It's for "slow connection[s]". It will be here for a while.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#79

Post by jasoncrawford »

adgar wrote: post #29

This is more like a "how to revert to 2006 GMail" list. I mean, he even goes out of his way to turn off Priority Inbox and important markers. That has nothing to do with the redesign - it's just turning off year+ old features, which is what a good portion of the post is. Luckily for the author, options exist to turn off all the features that have been released in the past many years. Of course, there's some apportion…

I tried Priority Inbox for a while when it first came out. It's an interesting feature and maybe it works for some people, but I decided I didn't need it.

It didn't matter until the redesign, though. In the new design, the "importance markers" are very similar in appearance to the stars, and they are right next to each other. It's hard to tell them apart at a glance. That's why I finally had to turn them off.

Re: How to cope with the Gmail redesign

#80

Post by xpressyoo »

This could be of interest to some of the readers. I'm the developer of Gmelius, a poly-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox, http://gmelius.com . The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

NB: As you will surely notice I'm currently redesigning the homepage... Feel free to leave me your comments/suggestions both on the extension and the new website.

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