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Comment by awakeasleep | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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