Designing Gmail’s new left navigation | Hacker News Reader

Designing Gmail’s new left navigation

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31 pointscleverjake22 comments

I feel I just read a bunch of words that stand in stark contrast to reality, with me finding the new design confusing, badly laid out, hiding important parts of the UI without any scrollbar indication and even more damningly I find it looks amateurish in 'compact' mode, the only practical configuration for seriously using it as a mail client.

I also can't understand how it can feel so awful when using it, they claim to have tweaked timings but this is exactly one of the parts of it that drives me crazy prompting me to keep switching back, UI elements suddenly spring to life unexpectedly. They seem to have got them all totally wrong.

I've been trying my best to like it but I've had enough now. The massive gulf between this botched redesign and something like the iPhone where every action 'feels' natural just shows how hard good design is. There are even UI inconsistencies like the reply/reply all/forward mock 'text' box keeps the mouse as an arrow instead of a pointer or text cursor, I still hesitate for a few seconds over it as my brain hasn't learnt to just go ahead and click it.

It just doesn't feel finished. The whole thing just feels half baked.

On the other hand I have been impressed with the new GMail client in a mobile browser. Apart from a minor quibble that you have to scroll to the bottom to reply, it's really good.

Edit: It's also called GMail, not GChat, why keep pushing the chat functionality, grr.

"The end result is a system that is more flexible, more responsive, and always keeps your chat contacts and unread count visible"

I have to disagree. The new design hides the unread count of labels you have that didn't make the cut to be always visible. I now have to hover over the label sections in gmail to keep tabs on my labels. Thus I really dislike this new design. What used to be accomplished at a glance now requires conscious mouse movement.

EDIT: As I discovered below in this thread, you can drag the divider and make it so all labels are on screen at once. So my comment is now irrelevant.

> So my comment is now irrelevant.

Not at all. It's extremely nonobvious, and had been annoying the hell out of me for weeks. The default behavior is just terrible.

If even the computer nerds can't figure out how to configure your interface, you've done something wrong.

You can drag the label above the "cut" to make it always visible.

No, you can drag the cut divider past the label you want to expose, which then leaves all the other (unwanted) ones exposed as well. The new functionality is OK, but that's all - hardly worth a self-congratulatory press release on how it was designed. And I'm mystified about why the left column is so narrow; I don't use a widescreen monitor, but even at a 4:3 screen ratio and with a relatively low resolution of 1280:1024, the left-hand column feels cramped and inefficient, with everything organized vertically into lists and dropdowns.

You know what I'd like? Being able to net my labels without the nesting being in the label title. I have a Family label, with sub-labels like House, Medical, and so on. These show up in the list of emails as Family/Medical which is a waste of space. true, I might have other medical categories, but if I did I could use color to differentiate them.

No, you can drag the cut divider past the label you want to expose, which then leaves all the other (unwanted) ones exposed as well.

You can drag the divider up and down to change the number of labels that are shown. You can also drag-and-drop individual labels across the divider to show or hide them. I just tested on FF, Chrome, and IE and it works.

I can do the former, but the latter seems to be broken at present. Might be because I'm in using a dev build with multiple flags enabled ATM though.

1280x1024 is 5:4.

The More You Know ~

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That doesn't work for me (Chrome on OSX). The label is draggable, but I can never get it to be droppable (it always returns to its original location). I also have more labels than can fit in the "always visible" section.
EDIT: Ah! But you can drag the cut divider itself. Sweet! All my labels are on the screen again. Thanks!

The upside is my chat roster is not pushed down really far. I know of the labs feature to put the roster on the right side but that ends up having annoying layout quirks (and, admittedly, irrational ugliness) which make that even less desirable.
And then of course the punch line is I don't chat much in Gmail these days anyway.

It's sad that so much thought and energy went into designing something so mind-blowingly awful.
I'm with city41, I'm constantly chasing my labels now.
I don't WANT gmail to act more like a native app and less like a webpage.
If I did - I'd use a native app, not a web app.

I agree. I hate this concept of making it feel like an app... if I wanted an app, I would use the (awful) tablet interface.
To me, the innovation of gmail was that it made a usable webpage, that worked the way a website should, and yet was still efficient and user-friendly. Part of this was done by copying the better aspects of the app world (keyboard shortcuts, eager fetching of messages, fast performance, etc). But it still fundamentally felt like an efficient, intuitive, information-delivery system (the web).
Copying the worst aspects of the app world (multiple scrollbars per page/screen, massively higher cognitive load due to all the scrolling, etc) is not an improvement.

Yes, exactly.
I hate that they are hijacking the browser's behaviour and replacing the normal scrollbars with those silly little things for example.
Trying to make this act like it's not a webpage is awful. Make it work like a better webpage, not less of one.

Suppose someone launched a competitor to Gmail today. What would be some killer features from Gmail that should be emulated? What are some anti-features from Gmail that should NOT be cloned? And what are some brand new features that should be introduced?
I know it's a bit nuts to try and go up against Google, but what the heck, allow me to speculate and daydream for a bit :)

Single most important Gmail feature that every single email client (web, desktop, mobile) should have adopted since April 2001 but didn't: conversations.
Also, if you're thinking of designing an email client, you should take some inspiration here http://smcllns.com/a-better-email-client that will of course make it a very targeted email client, but I think that's the only way to make a dent in that space. Also look at Facebook Messenger.

Yeah, that is a bit strange.
Sure, it's not entirely straightforward to figure out an algorithm for sorting emails into conversations. But it's not rocket science either.

The algorithm doesn't seem to be the problem. The UI for displaying conversations however, has been done very poorly by some competitors.

I'm getting a bit tempted to start coding :)
Do you think there is any room in this field (ie web mail), though?

I was using the new theme in beta for months just fine without issue until they recently launched the new design. IMO, the left navigation is the worst part of the new design, which was not present in the old beta theme. Everyone says it's possible, but I still can't figure out how to show all my labels. I also have Google Docs in my left menu, but that is now hidden in a secondary menu (the ellipsis). This means that I can't simultaneously access my gtalk and gdocs list. I have the screen real estate for it—why is it modal?!

If GMail decided to keep the inbox unread count visible at all times, then why didn't Google Reader keep the unread items counter visible at all times?

Wait, Google was not happy enough breaking scrolling in iOS so they decided to break it on Lion too?
I'm gonna try hard not to think they are doing it on purpose.

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