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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

#91

Post by KaeseEs »

I'm incredulous that one of the goals of the redesign was to make more powerful themes. New-style themes are much, much less powerful than the old-style themes - cf. the new Terminal theme, which can't even change the text color or font, but is rather a hollow shell of itself with a small gif of a blinking green cursor in the upper left corner the only remnant of its old self. A preview of the old page in my Opera speed dial is all that remains of my old green-on-black monospace friend; I have set it to never update.

Incidentally, the new UI for video calls makes the 'end' button the same color as the background, and it is very difficult to see.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#93

Post by sliverstorm »

zmmmmm wrote: post #33

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as…

Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well.

I'd say that depends on the subject. I don't want bold decisions to try and energize my experience with my text editor.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#94

Post by eridius »

furyofantares wrote: post #58
mortenjorck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like…

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 possibly tested as an improvement. I'm with the OP; I have to mouse over every button and read the tooltip to find the Report Spam one.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#95

Post by DavidAbrams »

anthonyb wrote: post #65
DavidAbrams wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. I'll call them inept and pan their design based on months of USE. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one example needed to prove the failure of this new design: http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...

Go to Settings > Labels, then pick the ones that you want to show. Pity your "months of USE" didn't take you that far...

WRONG. All of my labels/mailboxes are set to show:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7117915617_c0c8cab3fc.jpg

Any other wrong advice you'd like to try to contradict me with?

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#96

Post by seldo »

furyofantares wrote: post #58
mortenjorck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like…

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?

When something is as viscerally, obviously bad to me as the new GMail UI, I go with my gut. Google has no track record of great UI that would make me question that feeling. They built the world's simplest home page not because of some profound respect for minimalism; they just didn't have anything else to put on it.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#97

Post by DavidAbrams »

thezilch wrote: post #73
DavidAbrams wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. I'll call them inept and pan their design based on months of USE. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one example needed to prove the failure of this new design: http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...

Click the square/arrow to the right of any label, there are a plethora of options, including when and why a label should be shown at all costs. Frankly, the label functionality that exists now, in the redesign, is amazing.

Nope. Screen shot:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7117915617_c0c8cab3fc.jpg

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#98

Post by tallanvor »

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…

You should never be reluctant to question things.

From my experience, the new design is horrible for usability. The lack of definition between the menus and the content makes it much more difficult for me to pay attention to the emails. --I've had to switch to a theme, which helps a bit, but in my opinion it's still much harder to use than the older design.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#99

Post by seldo »

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…

FYI, I found this article really helpful:

http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...

It shows how to: get rid of "importance" markers, add some contrast back to the colors, remove superfluous whitespace, and most importantly, change the impenetrable icons back to text.

Re: GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

#100

Post by ThomPete »

theoj wrote: post #76
zmmmmm wrote: post #33

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as…

>> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to spe…

The solution is to find one or two contrast colors that you use sparingly. you would be surprised how much an icon or some text or a couple of elements in a contrasting color will make your design pop into life.

Think about it (loosly) the way you think about inheritance in OOP. What is the parent, what are the ancestors.

All elements on pages have a priority. That priority should be the guide of your visual heiarchy. This can be done with size alone but it can also be done with color.

Also black or almost black (#222-#333) as copy is always a good way to make sure your page has contrast. But again it depends on what you are doing.

I really need to finish my book on design for developers. I think I have found a way to create the bridge between being a developer and a designer. When I get to new york I will have more time.

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