Why Gmail's new design is unsuitable for heavy use | Hacker News Reader

Why Gmail's new design is unsuitable for heavy use

readwriteweb.com

253 pointsjzb132 comments

There should be a publication archiving the superficially thoughtful, hate-filled tirades that occur in reaction to every change that happens to public facing things.

Then, when we create something, we can look through the archives and see the volume of ire directed at what we've come to love, and draw a relaxed breath realizing you really can't please everyone.

A Google search for "Facebook outrage" is enough for me to remember that lesson.

Not only that, but there will always be more critics than people who like it. I enjoy the new design but don't have the urge to constantly rave about it.

There's a certain class of people for whom any change to something they are familiar with is automatically negative. I imagine that in 20 years, they'll be the market for phones with a physical dialer.

Haha, your argument is of a rare breed: it's self-negating. If the people belonging to your "certain class" automatically grow to enjoy what's familiar to them, then their first reaction to a new UI is the most unbiased information you're gonna get!

The real problem is that it's a lot easier to dismiss criticism than to sift through it to figure out what's valid and what's not.

Yeah, it's just "those people", because everything new is automatically better...

While I understand where you're coming from, I feel his criticism is well founded. There is noticeably less contrast and delineation. It also does take more to discover the interface - you have to actually hover over buttons. While you could argue that one would learn the buttons in time, the delineation issue won't go away. There's a reason they put a thin line around posts in G+

The "delineation" is a non-issue to me. I think this short article on the use of whitespace gets to the point: http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/whitespace-113/

The discoverability of the interface is always a trade-off. They probably have enough data to assume that users will in fact learn this interface from daily use. I preferred text too.

Delineation and white space are two related but different concepts. One is talking about some way of separating different parts of an interface, through lines or contrast (i.e. different colors). The other is talking about avoiding clutter, avoiding related items from stepping on each other. In a way, white space should be used for closely related elements, while delineation (there may be a better term for this) to allow you to separate larger items. If you look at the page you linked, the yellow/white contrast clearly delineates where the content column starts/ends.

The end goal is to convey the separation - that is achieved by both. The whole point of the article is that whitespace can be a (more) effective separator.

just noticed they haven't rolled out these changes to everyone, I still have an outline and text buttons: http://cl.ly/2X1r2G322r241K3M2Z0U

People should also note that the "classic" theme is still available. I like the "dense" version of the new theme, though I don't use the web interface much anymore.

Yes, convey separation, but after a certain number of pixels white space is not as effective anymore. Notice how in the example of the table he argues that for wider tables using white space is not effective, and that delineation using colors should be applied.

The brain has to look at a layout and make sense out of it. In real life we're aided by contrast to make sense where one object starts and where the other begins -- without contrast you end up with camouflage. When using white space our brains figure out the delineation based on positioning. If blocks of text are perfectly aligned we fill out the delineation automatically; so lines are not necessary. This process breaks down over large areas since our field of vision is small and we would have to scan the whole area before we would make sense of it.

In the new Gmail layout, the menu items are aligned to the left, and so is the content. There are no "lines" between the menu and content the brain can fill out. Of course we can tell where one stops and the other starts, but it takes longer, it wastes more brain cycles than necessary.

Based on the screenshot we do no see the same version. In your version you have a separation between the menu area and the body of the email, the buttons have text and not icons, so we're not arguing over the same layout. Also, I do not see a classic theme being available.

EDIT: I don't see a classic theme that would look like your screenshot.

The classic theme is the first option in my settings (it's the original, blue/silver one)

Right, but here's what that one looks like for my account: http://i.imgur.com/QiV1E.png

since when is whitespace not delineation? the fact that there isn't a 1px border there is irrelevant - the content and the navigation in the space indicated are separated by the largest portion of whitespace on the whole page.

It's not the white space that makes the delineation, is the alignment of the items around that white space. If I plot a bunch of blocks of text on a white canvas you couldn't make columns or rows out of that mess. You'd have plenty of white space, but no delineation.

A bigger problem for me is not the visual separation, but that there are functional, but invisible, frames in the layout. The header doesn't scroll, while the left sidebar and the main content scroll separately. So, in the middle of the whitespace there's a place where scrolling changes from scrolling the left panel, to scrolling the main content.

Without the line delineation, I found myself with the mouse hovered over the left column trying to move the main content and wondering why my scroll wasn't working. If you have tall enough content in the left sidebar a (non-standard) scrollbar appears (sometimes). But if you don't have content there, or aren't moused-over the correct areas, you don't get any indication of what's happening.

If the page was a normally scrolling page with no frames, the whitespace is not terrible to me. The way the page functions, it needs the 1px frame that Google+ has.

This is even a bigger problem on small screens. On my 13" laptop I can barely see 2 contacts in the chat list and have to move my mouse over it all the time so that it grows to 5 contacts and try to scroll those.

I laughed when I saw the massive arrow pointing to the large object that delineates the exact shape of the thing that isn't delineating anything apparently. A perfect instance of not being able to see the wood for the trees.

Not at all. Wider != more delineation.

Analogy: it's easier to cross a lawn than to scale a wall.

Edge-like features create an intensity wall in the image signal, whereas plateaus of do not.

There's a clear biological / image processing basis for this.

> since when is whitespace not delineation?

When it's so low-frequency (wide) that it doesn't trigger the edge-detectors in your retina.

I actually opened this article expecting to see well founded criticism of the new Gmail interface...what I was presented with, instead, was quasi-humorous distaste for the new design, which the author admits is partly due to "people not wanting to change". That said, I'm sure there is well founded criticism of the new GUI, and I'm not criticizing the author's style. I'm making a point that a lot of the "Facebook rage" we see going on in different platforms is more like pouting and humorous discontent. It blows over quickly when people adjust, and rarely impacts the true practicality of a service. For example, how many people (and this is an honest question) would sort their mail by subject and use the other features the author mentioned aren't supported in Gmail?

Personally (and I can't justify it, it's entirely personal), I use Gmail, I love it, and I don't notice much of a difference. I also love to use Thunderbird, but not for a dislike of Gmail, but because it's right on my desktop. It's that simple. I feel that if something bigger were going on in the web, this wouldn't get as much blog attention.

Superficially thoughtful? I grant you, that kind of stuff happens a lot, but in my opinion, that isn't what happened here. This guy makes a lot of solid points:

-There IS a lot more wasted space in the new interface. Bad.

-The new button designs ARE a lot less clear and DO take up more space. Bad.

-The information density, crucially, is much lower, without any corresponding gains to make up for it. Bad.

It would still be nice to be come back, say, a year later, and see if the UI concerns still hold up. There were a lot of solid complaints about the Facebook news feed right when it launched, too.

Just playing the devil's advocate here, but would you not say Google's search homepage has a lot of "wasted space"? I don't think one can always make such a quick judgment about whether space is a bad thing or not.

I would not say that, no. Google's search homepage does not have a primary function that is similar in any way to Gmail's primary function.

The Gmail homepage, of course, should be showing you as much data as possible; as many emails as possible with enough contextual data and UI to read/delete/sort them.

Google's search homepage isn't an information-dense medium.

It's a fucking search dialog. It should be clear and simple.

Now: the search results pages should be informationally dense. And for the most part are (though I'm finding recent changes to be net negative).

Note that search engines which have gone in the direction of packing a shit-ton of distractions onto their homepages in a desperate move to chase "monitization" lose out -- look at Yahoo and Aol, virtually clones of one another at this point, as well as synonyms for Internet failure.

For every point he makes, there will be people who like the new way more.

And then there's the vast majority of people who don't care one way or the other.

For the people who really hate it there's always POP3 and IMAP access.

Have you tried changing the density setting? It's a bit hard to find, it's the wheel beneath the page navigation, not the one in the black bar at the top. But personally I have the problem that cozy is too spacy and dense is too dense. Dense is very dense. But I agree with your points concerning the default settings for density and the other points like the button design.

Except this was neither hate-filled nor superficial.

The toolbar buttons, for example are a great example of a major usability mistake: what we used to call "mystery meat navigation" back in the day, because it was difficult or even impossible to know in advance what would happen if you clicked a given button.

Incidentally this is exactly how I feel about every iPhone UI I've seen. A bunch of cute icons, but no clue as to how they will behave.

If anything the icons would make it more suitable for "heavy use" because once you get used to them they are an improvement to the old text, defeating the point of this superficial article even more.

It's not only that they have changed texts to icons, but also that the icons are really ugly, they do not communicate well the purpose of the buttons and that they are all grey blobs that are hardly distinguishable, I actually find it hard to get used to them for this reason. Also, as a general point, you can get used to almost anything interface-wise by using something for a very long time, but does this mean we should tolerate bad design?

Except, you know, that goes against basic principles of usability.

Forcing a user to stop and think about "what does this icon do" -- and yes, even your "heavy" users are going to run into this -- just to make something look pretty is basically always a bad idea.

> If anything the icons would make it more suitable

No, this is incorrect. I'm a heavy user of Gmail, and I still can't find the damn new refresh button. How many weeks should it take for me to get used to this so-called "improvement". I preferred it when it was text. I just don't see the new spiral icon thingie as "refresh".

Another way to look at it is if you make an improvement to something I don't care about, it's not an improvement. Especially, if it makes my job harder.

You need to actually measure what users do, not generalize from unsupported assertions.

I'm exactly opposite. I had no problem finding the refresh button since the icon used is basically the same exact icon used for refresh in multiple apps that I use everyday, including every browser that I use (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). It looks to me like a lot of the icons that have been used seem to be a standard in a lot of apps that use icons without text.

Internationalization issues could explain the change from a word based navigational to an icon based one. Long words from languages other than English might not fit well in the new layout.

People have been doing l10n for user interfaces for decades. There's always a way to make things fit and still convey meaning, even with languages that tend to have crazy-long words.

I like the cleanliness of the new design and the use of whitespace to separate things.

There are two general problems I have. One is the fact that the UI controls tend to blend in with the rest of the page, and the fact they're just icons isn't much help either. The other is inconsistency or otherwise controverting user expectation.

The first problem means to mark something as spam I have to first remember where to look for the button that doesn't stand out. I then have to hover over it until the tooltip shows to make sure I've got the right one.

The second one manifests itself in the behaviour of the toolbar, some of the UI element positions, and what I would call some rather basic principles:

On the actual mail screen, the toolbar has a fixed position, so it always sticks to the top of the page when you scroll. On the inbox, it doesn't. Why not?

The star icon is on the left on the inbox page. Why is it on the right when you view the email? (This has persisted from the old design, to be fair.)

Why have they taken an Android design cue and put the form submission elements at the top of the page? When you fill in any form, you expect the submit/cancel buttons to be below the form you're filling in, not above. I have been caught out several times trying to scroll the compose page (that no longer scrolls at all), only to realise the button I'm looking for is actually at the opposite end.

While Google may be getting a better eye for aesthetic design and simplicity, I think they're still quite a way from mastering intuition.

My biggest issue personally with the new gmail design is that all the current theme options are "two tone". By this I mean that with the old themes, you could have 1 color for the background in the left pane, another for the menu area of the current folder, and possibly another for the background in the email thread/ composition region.

For the new gmail look, theres just "background color" and "foreground color". Now I may just be a simple sentient hominid computer user, but most human beings that are neither horse nor hammerhead shark have this wonderful thing called depth perception (and color perception) which allows for more nuance in our perception than just "front bit" and "back thingy", and moreover our brain does a lot of heuristics when giving us our vision, one of which is using contrast in two neighboring objects to detect that they are separated (by those regions called borders).

Phrased a bit more directly, I think the biggest problem with the new gmail / reader ui's is not aesthetics. Its not UI standard practice, its not this new found homogeneity or "sparseness", though these all tie into the underlying problem. Rather its that the human brain is optimized for using contrast in depth or color or shade as a core hinting tool in perception. If they're going to stick to general new style, they need to provide more dimensions in how different ui elements can be themed.

The closest metaphorical analogue I can think of would be that the current ui approach would be like having the classic cartoon "Samurai Jack" (which has a very nice style that is notable for being one of the few cartoons that lack black outlines at all) being colored with only two very close shades of gray & a smattering of black and white in a few small places. Sure you can still see everything, but your brain has to work harder to actually keep track of it all.

I actually rather like the new design. It looks better and is more consistent than before.

Unlike the poster, I actually really like the simple geometric style it now uses. It's a nice break from the incessant rounded corners and gradients that so many other web sites seem to favor (HN's design is similarly refreshing).

The icons are a major change and take getting used to, but I think they improve the experience overall. The one think I find really stupid are the gear icons--one in the top righthand corner for the Google+ style bar and one gmail-specific. Having two identical icons that do the same thing is bad. Apart from that, I think it's a good design.

However, while I like the new design, I really dislike the default theme. Some of the gripes about separating content from the UI are addressed the other themes. I particularly like the "dusk" and "dark" ones.

Overall, with a few reservations, I like where they're taking the design and hope to see more web apps follow suit.

I've found that, using keyboard shortcuts (and with a decent Internet connection), Gmail becomes about as efficient as Pine/Alpine (I've never used mutt).

I don't love the redesign (I think the placement/appearance of the "important" and "starred" markers is terrible), but since they didn't change keyboard shortcuts at all, I can still plow through reading/replying/labeling messages.

Yeah, my biggest complaint originally was the lack of density, since being about to see the maximum number of emails has long been a killer feature of Gmail, but they fixed that with the compact view.

The contrast issues are there, but it really doesn't bother me because I'm in Gmail hours every day. All I need is consistency, responsiveness and comprehensive keyboard shortcuts.

Gmail was never especially pretty, but the redesign and my experience in highly focused mobile apps have pushed me back to Apple's native apps. To me, the most important elements of the screen seem to pop out in Apple's apps, and settings and controls sit thoughtfully in the background. My eyes gravitate to the most salient elements of the screen - the mail list and the currently opened e-mail. The compose window literally pushes to the foreground; I find the effect focusing. You can hide screen elements you don't use!

In Gmail I feel like every control demands my attention equally. Having a big red "compose" button might be nice for a novice, but it's irritating to me. I search my e-mails every now and then, but not nearly enough to justify the large search bar. Ditto with Gchat - MMS and Facebook have replaced IM as far as I'm concerned. The "Plus Bar" at the top of the screen is useless if you, you know, actually already have Google's Apps open most of the time (in which case clicking anything gives you an extraneous tab). Huge swathes of my screen are dedicated to things I barely use.

Yes!

I find the new interface has made me less efficient and distracted by the screen elements I use the least.

I don't know why it's taken so long to get on my nerves, but yeah, going from Gmail to native Mac apps really feels like going from a 7" netbook to a full size laptop.

"I search my e-mails every now and then, but not nearly enough to justify the large search bar. Ditto with Gchat - MMS and Facebook have replaced IM as far as I'm concerned."

Aside from disagreeing with that last sentence entirely, I see Gchat as being less obstrusive with the new look than with the old one. What used to be a semi-collapsible widget can now be reduced to a single icon on the lower-left.

The title is grossly inaccurate. I agree in principle with the author that Gmail has some legitimate criticisms which can be levied against it, but the title construes a much more serious tone than the article delivers. The first paragraph or so of the article, the opening, doesn't give a real criticism. It gives a short dissemination of why Gmail's theme isn't really fashionable. And while it makes a good segue into claiming Gmail is sacrificing feature for looks, I don't agree if that's the implicit complaint. I think Gmail can support "heavy use" even if it doesn't delineate from the side interface and doesn't give an entirely straightforward icon for every folder and label.

My little rant on Gmail's UX.

The Gmail's user interface has bloated over the years. I want my email to be simple. I don't want chat, ads, additional info related the recipients or senders on the top right corner, which is created to draw users attention to ads. I don't my top toolbar be fixed; I want it to go away when I scroll down.

The only things I like about the gmail over other email clients is: search, conversation, and spam filters, but it's becoming like an Outlook.

I found the icons a bit challenging at first (as a heavy user) but through that now.

It's really awesome to use in comparison with any other client I've worked with.

If I could change one thing it would be the unread/read background contrast.

I dunno. Is it ever good UI design to replace clearly labeled buttons with cute but confusing icons? Just because you can get used to it doesn't mean it's a good change.

Yes, for heavy users, because it makes it easier to see the important textual content on the screen instead of a lot of UI elements.

Agreed, a minimalistic (but fully functional) interface lacking eye-candy is a positive for heavy users. It reduces noise on-screen.

Yes. The time it takes to recognize something with your visual cortex is orders of magnitudes less than reading words.

Learning what the icons mean might take a little time and one might argue that spacial patterns are learned when reading anyways.

How do you know my visual cortex can't process words?

It's just a few symbols, I doubt that the difference between one symbol and 10 is that different for a learning machine like the human brain. (Especially since the location of the symbols is what matters. They show up in the same place every time, you only need the general shape of the word to confirm that's that right one.)

I also dislike that the email toolbar's buttons are now modal. (I don't believe they were modal before.) If select an email from a list, then new buttons appear and move the previous buttons to a different position on the page. This breaks users' muscle memory for clicking buttons quickly.

I guess I should learn the gmail keyboard shortcuts..

> I guess I should learn the gmail keyboard shortcuts..

Indeed you should. Muscle memory for clicking buttons is vastly inferior to muscle memory for hitting keys. All the more so for sequences of buttons and sequences of keys.

Gmail's redesign was what convinced me to finally switch to mutt.

I receive a lot of emails. I have to respond to a lot of them quickly. I don't want a slick, modern-art-inspired user-interface - I just want to get in and out of my inbox as fast as possible, with minimal distractions.

Putting an ssh service that runs Gmail through a mutt-like interface is the kind of 20%-time project I would do if I were at Google.

Alpine is the next best thing (via IMAP)

mutt + gmail + offlineimap

Is there a way to get archive, labels, and sending from multiple addresses to work? If so, I think I could abandon the web client completely.

Well, a modern-art-inspired UI is an UI with minimal distractions.

I'm a heavy user, and I still have no idea what the buttons do because I exclusively use the keyboard shortcuts. I'd assume most really heavy Gmail users avoid using the mouse.

the idea that this tirade is specific to "heavy users" is laughable. if anything, it applies more to light use than to heavy use. "mystery meat" navigation is generally a no-no, but the exception to that rule is in heavily used interfaces like email clients, where whatever is used will be memorized by all users incredibly quickly, and the removal of labels can actually streamline the interface.

the author doesn't make a single valid point regarding why the new interface is worse specifically for heavy users. its just a collection of negative reactions to change, like every other criticism since they introduced the new layout.

Here's what the mail box toolbars look like in the old versus new, and the author does cover these.

I think these pictures speak for themselves. One is a model of clarity and the other is a context-sensitive, icon-infested mess.

http://imgur.com/a/X4gdp

On my netbook, Gmail is now almost unusable. All the position:fixed elements at the top and botton and left side take up so much space, that the square left for the actual email message has become rediculessly small.

If they offered simply a "super-compact with no fixed bs" option, I would be happy. The rest of the new design I really don't care about.

I was an intern at Google when this change was first rolled out internally. Google employees had quite similar reactions.

The change was not implemented because people liked it, or didn't like it -- it was implemented because there was cold, hard data showing that new users utilized the new design more effectively than the old design.

What were the metrics used to determine that the design is "more effective"?

Some comments:

"A major problem that I have with the new interface is that Gmail has gone from text-based buttons to an icon-only design."

The text is there, it's simply been converted into tooltips. Are you really going to need to have the text there after using the button a few dozen times?

"The bad is that the compact is hard to read, and comfortable displays less information than the classic Gmail design."

Perhaps it's because I'm using a custom theme and so my view is different, but I don't really see much different between "compact" and the old design.

"Google has also removed the bottom toolbar from the interface. So if you're at the bottom of your inbox, you have to move the mouse back up to the top of the screen to archive, spam, mark messages read, and so forth."

Seriously? Are you going to suffer from RSI from moving your mouse up the screen each time you view your inbox? Not sure why your cursor keeps ending up at the bottom of the screen each time you finish checking your inbox.

The only points I can really agree with the author on is that the new interface is slower to use than before, and also on the excessive use of whitespace -- there does seem to be a lot of unused area with the new look (although it does make my theme look prettier).

>The text is there, it's simply been converted into tooltips. Are you really going to need to have the text there after using the button a few dozen times?

Multiply this attitude by a hundred apps/websites and YES I WANT TEXT. I don't use the toolbars of half my apps because I don't know what the buttons do, and I shouldn't have to work to find out.

There's a balance between using additional screen real estate for more info and the user having to take an extra step to get that additional info, such as hovering over a button. For some people, such as myself, there is more work involved for the eyes that have to scan over that extra content everyday as compared to hovering over an unknown button once in a blue moon.

but the icon buttons are bigger than the text they replaced!

And even if they're not, I have to do mental work: icon -> wtf does this picture mean -> english translation. I find that far more tedious than standard word scanning.

The best icon is a word. There's no interpretation necessary between picture and purpose. This new version looks like something from Microsoft ... change for the sake of change.

Exactly.

If icons are the answer, why don't we use hieroglyphics everywhere?

One of the few rationales I can think of for icons is that it makes internationalization a slightly easier task.

The losses for that win aren't particularly compelling for me though, and I dislike the icons myself.

The one thing which I hate most about Gmail's new design is the damned feedback button is always there the next time, no matter how many times I hit "X".

If there is something you don't like about Gmail, just click the feedback button and let Google know.

http://ubuntuincident.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/hide-about-th...

Yes sir, I did do that. Thanks for the link.

Tufte, who we all seem to worship, would praise separation of elements with whitespace instead of dividing lines.

This article, like most things from uxmovement.com, would be a lot easier to stomach with data backing up the author's preferences.

I don't even know who is Tufte, and don't worship anyone, thanks.

My #1 complaint: The grabber for expanding the height of the textbox has been deleted!

See here: http://i.imgur.com/MEGM1.png

Previously, I'd expand the textbox to give myself more space (and "breathing room", if you will).

"There's no divider between the mail contents and the navigation on either side. Too much white space in many areas."

Um, the white space is the divider. This really feels like they're complaining because something changed and no one likes change.

Is just whitespace enough to be considered a real divider? You're eyes can't track it every well in a complicated interface. You need a huge amount of whitespace to work like real dividing line.

I've been using the new design for about a week and overall I think it's an improvement, but I've been griping non-stop about the chat/contact area hogging space even when you drag it down as small as possible.

This comment started out as another one of those gripes, until I decided to make one more attempt to hide the chat area for good. Turns out that clicking on the speech bubble icon closes the contacts list/chat area. Can't believe it took me a week to try that.

I think the visuals are fine. But there are lots of new UI issues.

For example, I frequently copy / paste an email address into from an email header into the search bar. Now I can't do that without clicking that tiny little triangle, which is so small I usually miss. It's extremely annoying.

If there's a better way to do this I'd love to know.

edit- the tiny triangle: http://i.imgur.com/U4qBR.png

If you hover over the person's name, and then click "more" in the popup, there is a "Recent conversations" option that runs a similar search.

I think this design is very good and better for heavy users compared to the previous one:

* The new way to reply to emails makes it a lot faster to reply in the common case. It makes emails more similars to chat conversations where you can reply with just one line or alike, that is a necessary shift today, otherwise no one will reply to emails soon as it is a killer of your time.

* The icons will tell you what they do if your pointer is over the icon, since there are a few icons after a week or so you know what every one is doing, and the fact they are very well "exposed" in the UI makes their use comfortable.

* New stars make more sense, less different types, more semantically shaped and colored.

* When the UI is set to "compact" is the perfect amount of information IMHO, if you receive a lot of emails. But you can change that depending on the amount of conversions you handle and on your tastes.

What I really don't like instead? Formatting is not retained on emails, it strips newlines, spaces and so forth in a random way. This is very very bad.

I wonder why he doesn't try the basic interface. It still has text buttons and all the "information density" you could need.

I wonder the degree to which user data is driving their choices. On the one hand, they have a lot of it. On the other, it can’t really drive design.

Data can be used to support hypotheses, but it will not tell you what to try. Very curious how Google deals with this.

I felt this was pretty fairly articulated critique of the changes to Gmail. And the author admits that some of their issue may be part of a resistance to change meme. I've gone on record with my issues about too much white space. And even in 'compact' mode it is less useful to me.

Overall its the down side of G+ which has the effect of opening up things to change which perhaps shouldn't be changed.

But on the positive side it creates opportunity for folks like Mailgunner to get in. Its the tech version of the circle of life.

The new gmail interface really feels like it's made for a touchscreen, problem is a touchscreen UI feels awkward on a system with a mouse.

Question for all you web people out there, what would the difficulty of making a stylish/greasemonkey/something script to keep the old layout/look? I'm a programmer but I work on embedded systems in C, I don't have to worry about this fancy internet stuff.

After getting used to the icons and learning to switch on "compact" mode on my laptop, I like it about as well as the old version.

I wonder if the interface would have been better received if the tighter density was used as a default setting? Do first impressions of a UI add as much weight to the way we perceive it, as they do when meeting a person for the first time?

Personally I think the interface is good .. I like it, and I'm sure I'll grow more comfortable with it as time goes on.

If you're a heavy email user, you should not be using webmail. You should be using a real email client.

Gmail was actually OK for heavy use for a long time. And I've never found a mail client that I actually like - more like clients that suck less than others.

What argument do you have to support this? What can a native client do that a web-based one could not?

I'm currently using a setup where I can see incoming mail in a taskbar (unread count and subject), press Win-o to spawn mutt, enter to open first unread, z to archive, and qq<enter> to close mutt. With this, a lot of email is dealt with in six keystrokes and under two seconds total (no interruption in workflow).

I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client, but I think that the machinery to do that would be less natural. (My sense of what is natural might be warped, though.)

Also, there is much to be said about the ability to customize your mail client to suit your needs. The very fact that people are complaining about Gmail's new design shows that a lot of people are relying on Google to tell them how they should manage their email, and try to adapt their needs to the tool rather than the other way around. This is not a technical limitation of web-based mail clients, but most webmails I know aren't really hackable.

> I'm not saying that you wouldn't be able to do this with a web-based mail client.

In fact, using gmail should take fewer strokes than that. Assuming you have a keyboard shortcut to spawn a gmail window, enter will take you to the first message, and 'e' will archive that message. Command-Q/Alt-F4 to quit.

Labels can be applied with an 'l' and the label name, next/last message is 'n'/'p'.

The full list of keyboard shortcuts is available here: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6594

It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page.

You can customize the keyboard shortcuts.

Go to Labs and enable Custom Keyboard Shortcuts, then go to town! I changed a bunch of my shortcuts, for example an operation I do quite often is "select all unread, them mark as read." But I couldn't remember the shortcuts they assigned - they didn't seem mnemonic at all. I changed them to SU for Select Unread and MR for Mark Read. Bingo!

I'm not sure it's universal, but I have "Custom keyboard shortcuts" available under Labs that let's me customize as desired. Click on the non-intuitive gear-shaped icon in the upper right corner to check if it's there for you too.

> It would, of course, be better if they let you customize the shortcuts and sped up the loading of the initial page.

Those were the main things I had in mind (along with adequately customizable desktop notifications). As for shortcut customizations, the Labs feature isn't as good as a configuration file in my opinion (slower to edit, harder to share, harder to diff, etc.). As for the loading of the initial page, I still wonder why it takes so long... You could probably get a nice setup by keeping a Gmail window open and assigning a shortcut in your WM to display this window, but it's not a common feature in WMs.

Properly working right-click and click and drag for starters. Neither of those exist in Gmail.

If you're a heavy email user who uses your email from multiple machines, an efficient webmail is perfect.

No, you use offlineimap to dump the mail to the host(s) you need to access it from, and GET SHIT DONE.

Or you aggregate the mail to a single system you access via SSH and GET SHIT DONE. So long as you're using Web protocols to talk to your mail, cut out the complexity of the browser and leverage ssh & screen.

Similarly, if you deal with mail from multiple systems, you can relay/forward it, or aggregate it via multiple retrieval systems (offlineimap is great and synchronizes sent/read mail from numerous locations), but older POP protocols can also work)

I have a daily mailstream that runs in the thousands of messages (many boxes, much complaining, many people, other stuff).

I need an email system that surfaces stuff that matters, fast, effectively, and efficiently, and lets me find, process, and adjudicate mail practically.

If you've never used an efficient and powerful console/CLI mail client such as mutt or mh, you have no idea of the power this provides.

You can't just say "No." It's not rational.

Plenty of Googlers get thousands of messages per day and they use Gmail. There are filters and importance heuristics built into Gmail to help with huge volumes of email. To say "nope, you can't do it that way," flies in the face of reality.

I can filter out the stuff that I don't necessarily need to look at with GMail.

What I can't do is invoke programmatic tools on the web interface itself (at least not without learning a slew of web API stuff).

As opposed to being able to process my local Maildirs with shell tools.

How do you, say, generate stats or view diffs on 84,800 gmail messages? I can do that, trivially, with mutt (tags and commands/pipes) or from the shell outside of mutt.

I still find mutt's filtering notation (~f ~t ~N ~U ~d ... ) to be far more useful and far faster for most use-cases than GMail.

I'm accessing that corpus via both tools right now. Mutt is generally the more useful of the two. One of the advantages, again, of offlineimap is that I've got the option of doing either. And while I'll fully admit that there are some mails for which a full GUI client is more useful, plain text still wins in most instances. And even where I'm not in mutt (say, on an Android device), straight text virtually always wins.

I'll also admit to using GMail's filter rules to classify my mail, though they have problems, most notably the inability to un-archive specific messages, or to re-order / order filters at all. At least so far as I've discovered.

They're still generally better than Microsoft's pants mail rules.

In my daily life there are 10 devices I might use to access email. Instead of spending time to configure IMAP and/or SSH on every device, I just log into Gmail and get shit done the same way in all 10 places.

It takes a lot of effort to configure an ssh client to be sure.

There are devices I may want to access email on.

And there are the devices on which I get shit done.

Mail app on my phone, with filter rules, keeps most of the useful stuff front and center.

It's trivial enough to copy an ~/.offlineimaprc and ~/.muttrc across Linux systems (or Macs FWIW) for everything else.

Sure, if I absolutely need to I can log into Gmail through a web interface on another system. With user/pass auth, that means, though, that I'm extending my security envelope to include whatever exploits that machine may have. Given I've got the Internets in my pocket these days, that's pretty much never necessary.

If you can suggest an e-mail client that's we'd find as nice to use as the Gmail web interface, then maybe. I ditched the desktop clients - both GUI and console based - for a reason: All of the ones I've tried have interfaces that suck.

Yes, that includes mutt and mh.

What's your mail volume look like?

What's your job?

What's your use case?

Thousands of messages a day, though most of it filtered so it never shows up in my inbox.

I'm a technical director at a media agency, but the vast majority of my e-mail is stuff that goes to my personal account, related to various open source projects and my other things I do in my spare time - my work e-mail is maybe 5% of my total e-mail volume.

My use case is accessing my e-mail from 10+ different places, some of which I don't have decent shell access from (such as my phone, where a console based, key based client is out of the question), combined with heavy use of labels and priority inbox.

I gave up on console based e-mail clients about 12 years ago, when I co-founded a webmail service. Never looked back.

I take it that most of that email is stuff that you can safely ignore, much of it generated by humans, the remainder perhaps automated reminders/responses, etc.

In my case, most of the messages are system alerts, logs, notifications, etc., along with human-generated messages, reminders, etc.

Some I can ignore, some I've got to have at least a gist of what they contain. Trending patterns in others can be very valuable.

For all of these, a console client generally offers major wins over webmail, as I've described.

I think "multiple machines" may also mean your friend's computer. Are you going to insist that he install PuTTY just so you can check your mail? Because god forbid you'd want to use a browser there, or at the library, or at work where SSH outbound is blocked, etc.

Even better is having it all available via IMAP and available to you in every mail client you use (desktop or mobile) as well as being able to carry your real mail client, mail, configuration, macros, extensions, etc on a USB drive or in the cloud (Dropbox, etc) using Thunderbird Portable so you get the same experience everywhere you go.

And then every computer you sit down on, you have to configure it.

No thanks. I like being able to pick up my wife's laptop and check email effortlessly.

If this is a issue for you, a console-based client is a reasonable substitute. Terminals and SSH are pretty universal too (less so than web browsers, though). [Yes, you need to download putty on windows machines, but it's not that much of an effort.]

Just plug in your flash drive with Thunderbird Portable on it. There's no need to reconfigure anything.

Disagree completely. I have yet to find a mail client that pairs Gmail's keyboard shortcuts for rapid mail processing with a decent GUI (not pretty, but extremely utilitarian). I use labels heavily, I use multi-stars, and I control everything by the keyboard. I guess the old-school UNIX mail clients can match the keyboard efficiency, but they don't have as useful a GUI. Maybe if I was on Linux there is a client to prove me wrong, but I'm on OS X, so an X GUI is not going to cut it.

I'm not going to go so far as to say "should", but I will throw in that I use Gmail for personal use (1-5 emails per day) and Outlook at my day job. Outlook 2010 has proven itself stable & valuable when I am getting 100+ emails per day and keeping many of them, as it is pretty good at managing a lot of email.

(If you are big on "Inbox Zero" that's not an important feature, but here email backlogs often serve as another type of reference, complimenting our wikis. It sounds awful, but in practice you wouldn't really want to commit a lot of information to a wiki that is priceless for a week and trash thereafter)

Huh? Keeping email backlog for reference and inbox zero aren't mutually exclusive. Why would you keep this backlog in your inbox?

What's with the zero pixel left margin? Lots of websites seem to be doing that these days.

Usually it is a variable margin that wasn't tested on a screen the width of a normal human's.

I still do not understand why the old interface cannot be made available for another year or two.

The visual changes are obviously just cosmetic with little to no backend modification.

It definitely feels like designers were given complete override to engineers.

So, everyone and their mothers are creating web applications suitable for tablets. Do you really believe there's no room for web applications that could be accessed from a good ol' desktop pc? How come is that?

People love to whine about changes to websites. OTOH, nobody complains when their TV remote changes layout or when their living room rearranges itself overnight.

It's a double standard.

What? Gmail redesigned? I use a desktop client, so I never really focus on the webside.

I also think the new design is a step backwards in usability. And yes I thought we all learned by now that symbolic icons are not as good as text labels. That's pretty much the point of human languages like English -- they are symbols which have a meaning, and you arrange them in different ways to convey different meanings. Given a choice between some arbitrary shape and the text "STOP", guess which one will more clearly and unambiguously convey "STOP"?

The pencil icon, obviously. Or maybe the square with a rectangle on top.

even though i think windows is wrong by not unpleasing users with design changes for the better... and not agreeing that white space may be ok to separate the tag list and the message, there's no excuse to:

1. the buttons without labels. your user WILL have to hover the mouse every time he forgets one button.

2. the fact that it moved from a huge clickable area to 17x17px button to see the message headers (and that the header information was vastly reduced)

maybe some huge user testing proved those right... but my constant cursing says that at least a 5% exist.

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