Hacker News Reader

Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

Picking on Google Mail is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. I use Gmail, and I like many of it's qualities, but it has a UI that seems to have been designed by a 9 year old boy on his first experiment. It's laughably random, or perhaps 'eccentric'.

View on HN

Really? I've never seen a better webmail interface than Gmail's. Can you justify your claim by providing some of "it's" qualities that are so laughable?

I hate to get into a flamewar but 90% of the themes they are so proud of break basic usability guidelines: Too distracting, not enough contrast between read and unread items, ignoring color theory for the meaning of colors used in the interface, etc. Drives me crazy.

Edit: And as I posted to my Tumblr (http://ajh.us/GmUI) just 5 days ago:

> Today I opened a Gmail window. At the top of the screen, I saw a yellow message beginning, “Hey, this is important! …” I never finished reading it because I had clicked something else (a message) and the supposedly important message disappeared, never to be seen again.

> So the Gmail team either

> 1. Lied about the importance of the message, or

> 2. Totally failed to make me actually read it.

> Not so impressive UI design.

I've seen 'Hey, this is important!' before: on a gmail account that had its password compromised. I seem to recall that it was 'you might be compromised, you should verify your secondary address for account recovery' You might want to check your Gmail usage log at the bottom of the window, check your secondary address, and change your password.

Oh, it's because they think the account is compromised? Huh. I've had that message a few times before, noted that yes, that is the recovery address I told them about and yes, it's wrong, but no, I won't update it just because it's been a while. If I had known they asked because they noticed I'd logged in from a new location, I would have updated the record.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com