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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

#81

Post by mthreat »

thezilch wrote: post #78
mthreat wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, changing the labels to text is a big help. I didn't even notice it there in General settings. It still doesn't change the tiny "..." link to a text label (the thing you click on in a message to show previous messages in the conversation). See my other comment here about Fitts' Law.

While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?

I use it all the time. I've found that clicking on the previous messages in the conversation view is much slower (requires hitting their servers, which are usually slow). But clicking on the "..." must not require a server hit, because it's instant.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#82

Post by anthonyb »

paul wrote: post #69
anthonyb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't on my GMail, because I figured out how to change the theme ...

As did I, but the defaults shouldn't be awful.

Who says they're awful? You just don't like them.

Fair enough that you don't, but putting your opinion forward as fact (like most of the people here and the OP) doesn't really advance the argument. Perhaps a lot of people have trouble finding the compose button on first use?

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#84

Post by BlackNapoleon »

pedrogrande wrote: post #62

Personally, I love the new GMail interface and have been using it for months. I like that is less cluttered and that I can more easily configure what is displayed. I've changed the buttons to be text in the settings as I did find the icons hard to pick at a glance. I also love the new themes. It's interesting to me to see so many people grumble at interface changes whether it's Facebook or Gmail.

Same...

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#85

Post by pirateking »

njharman wrote: post #71

Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste. To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "e…

Great analogy between a designer's idea of "taste", and the engineers equivalent "elegance".

To take it further, just as the shortest code isn't always the best, the most minimal design is also not best by default.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#86

Post by reneherse »

ekianjo wrote: post #29
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 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 kn…

To give a counter example to your first point regarding the "old Google": A year or two ago they did a major redesign of the Google News page. There was a huge amount of negative and often thoughtful feedback in the user discussion forums, but it was all seemingly ignored, and the new interface was implemented ostensibly without change.

The page has since changed again, I believe, and it's even more of a mess. Scanning the page while scrolling is nearly impossible unless you've very carefully placed your mouse pointer over elements that do not expand on hover. (It's really maddening and I barely use the page anymore because of it.)

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#87

Post by tikhonj »

twoodfin wrote: post #17

I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.

I've also found the "important" filtering very useful. It's fairly rare now that I get an email that really matters and is not marked "important". I think that it takes a while for it to figure out my patterns (yay for machine learning), but after that it works great. I bet most people just weren't patient enough to train it properly. (Of course some may just have more complicated ideas of what an important message is than me.)

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#88

Post by halayli »

Forcing users to relearn an interface without providing any added value makes no sense.

I ended up moving to Mail.app (which isn't perfect) because of the hideous in-page scrolling forced on me in the new Gmail interface.

Desktop experience is unbeatable; snappier interface, better performance, wider access to system resources, better integration with the OS, and you don't have to rely on the browser to be open all the time. I find this advantageous especially when composing emails.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#89

Post by anthonyb »

mthreat wrote: post #81
thezilch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?

I use it all the time. I've found that clicking on the previous messages in the conversation view is much slower (requires hitting their servers, which are usually slow). But clicking on the "..." must not require a server hit, because it's instant.

I don't find it that slow - but you can hit 'expand all' in the top right (next to the printer icon) to download the whole thread at once.
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