Kevin Fox on recent Google UX changes: from strange-to-me to just-plain-crazy

> First up is the 'new tab' chicklet in the Chrome tab bar. Somewhere around Chrome 16 the '+' disappeared from it, leaving a little ghost of a button that, to my mind, wouldn't be recognized for what it was by a user who hadn't already formed their mental model on earlier versions of Chrome.

I'd noticed this and it was very irritating! I assumed it was a bug and for whatever reason the image was missing, not that they had intentionally removed it. That's nonsensical to me, without the + being there it indicates... nothing. His point is exactly right.

Search results not carrying over to Google News when you click the black header tab is something that drove me crazy for a good week until I trained myself to use the left-side menu for switching between result types.

It doesn't make sense, particularly when "News" is the ONLY tab which doesn't carry the search terms over. Try it with Images, YouTube and Maps; wonderful. I wouldn't necessarily expect convention to follow with Gmail or Documents, sure, but NEWS? Come on!

The missing + on Chrome made me think I had a screwy update.

I'm most confused about Google's decision to remove the links from the logos. This is a convention engrained in the interwebs and I can't come up with a single reason why they would change it. Sure maybe inexperienced users wouldn't know the functionality exists, but when has that ever been a reason to remove a feature?

I think there was a HN discussion about this recently, but I missed it. Anybody know why they made this decision?

The + would have been removed from the Chrome UI because it reduces Google's claim to the "+" mark in their Google+ branding. Google wants people to think "Google+" when they see a button with a + on it (not "create new tab").

Its not just Google - most 'UI/UX experts' are actually really poor. Look at the mobile phone world for instance - it wasn't until the iphone that most people realised that every major company had overlooked the possibilities....

Company owners need not just to employ 'experts' but actually take an interest in these things themselves, which is rare. Otherwise you tend to end up with these kind of highly qualified fools.

I miss Google's early (engineer-led) minimalism...

I've been using the logo-without-link UI for about two months, and I no longer even think about clicking the logo. It no longer registers as something that would make sense to do.

The designs of the individual applications provide stronger action buttons than a generic "reset" button would. This encourages users to be more efficient; instead of "returning home" after reading an email, you'll click "Archive" and have less clutter in your inbox. Similarly, Google+ provides many choices for what to do next. Maybe you want to look at your circles or photos instead of your stream. The new UI makes them all equally easy.

I feel like people use the logo as a "I'm bored, show me new stuff" button, but that is pointless because the Google apps automatically update as new stuff becomes available for you. Save yourself a useless click.

I wouldn't have made this change, but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

(As for the + going missing in Chrome... I can't even begin to explain that one.)

Has anyone else been confused by the fact that in gmail when you are viewing an email there are two buttons with arrows pointing up and to the left. One takes you back to the inbox and the other replies to the email. One is curvy the other has a right angle. One is on the left and one is on the right. Neither have labels. Can I go back to the old design now please.

The new Gmail is worse than the last one. I have dropped a few feedback lines. A few examples:

- The decoupling of reply box and the email "cards". - The removal of colors in the names, which was very useful to guide yourself through the different actors in a email conversation.

Just to new a few. The new Gmail pretends to be better, but it just can't cut it off.

Honestly, google's UI for many things is just awful. I recently had to help an aunt who was trying to import contacts from her old gmail account into her new gmail account. It's a simple enough task if you're on our side of the digital divide, but it's impossible for anyone who isn't "good with computers." Of course the documentation for doing this was woefully out of date and unhelpful, so I couldn't just point her to that. Even the simple step of signing out of your gmail account is totally hidden and only available when you just try clicking on things (wich "we" do, but "they" don't). To get to your contacts you click on the red word "Gmail" (obvious, huh?), and then you have to click on "more", and then "export" (export what?). Absolutely none of this would be obvious to a non-savvy user. At the least they could provide up-to-date documentation or a more useful "help" feature. Gmail is great for me as a savvy user who employs all of the keyboard shortcuts, ala vim. But I can't blame the older generation for just giving up whenever they need to do anything slightly out of the ordinary, because we're just not designing/developing products that are usable to them.

Agree wholeheartedly with this post. Thing is; I have never come across a so-called user experience expert that had a single particularly insightful thing to say about a user interface.

Indeed, my experience has been that I get more insight from "lay" people than these guys.

I can't even be bothered to count the number of different items on the Google menu. Actually I just have... it's 17 items (for me), plus an "even more" item. I'd love to see the analytics for that one!

Now, you might forgive them because, well, if you have lots of products then you need a way to navigate to them... EXCEPT the millions they spend every year on making menu-based navigation completely redundant by their world-beating search.

If I want Google Maps, I will either type "maps" into Chrome's address bar, which auto-completes it, OR (as most non technies will do, I hazard a guess) I will type something (e.g "maps") directly into Google.

The unfortunate thing is that this is not just Google. It 99.9% of websites I have ever visited. OK, so most small companies do not have the resources for a dedicated UX person, but the only big-company website I can think of with a sane UX is Apple. Is it really all that hard? Actually I suspect it is - it's Conway's Law in full effect.

What I find really shocking is how the UX of the main google search page has deteriorated for me. It gives me all sorts of crap that doesn't make any sense ... and I don't even know how to complain since all the content is personalized to me (e.g. photographs). Google's search page used to be an Internet treasure ... for me, it is now another example of how the quest for revenue growth destroys beautiful products.

I like the plus label removed.

For someone who never ever used a tabbed browser, “+” doesn't mean “new tab”. It doesn't even mean ”add a thing“. It means “sum”.

Web browser is the most basic application to use this icon.

The icon just doesn't help because user has no prior knowledge of the metaphor anyway.

My two biggest annoyances with Gmail:

One of my accounts has this bar at the top reminding me that a couple accounts are linked. It says this notice will remain for a few days, then disappear... it's been there now for 3 or 4 months.

Secondly, Gmail auto-trims signatures. This is annoying by itself, because I don't think Google should get to decide, by fiat, that signatures are passe. Worse, the trimming often trims much more than intended -- sometimes whole messages. It's totally unprofessional when e-mails to clients & partners go out sans signature, closing, and the bottom half of my e-mail.

Naturally, getting a hold of Google for help with this is a laughable Sisyphean endeavor.

The last few days, gmail has been a pain for me to use specifically because I can no longer click on the logo to return to my inbox after viewing an email thread. Navigating my mouse to the "Inbox" link in the nav menu is difficult because I have to actively distinguish "Inbox" between all the other categories that look similar, whereas I can click on the logo without thinking.

I was more annoyed by the little head to the left of the tabs in Chrome which indicates the current profile. I don't use profiles. But I've just discovered that the head goes away if you delete the sample profiles that they created when they added the feature. Duh.

"You will like it! You will get used to it! I know what's best!" The designers will scream to their users.

This may be, just the beginning.

It's not just the "+" missing from the new tab button or the logo issue, it's a LOT of things. Gmail's new "blank sheet of paper" look. The annoying notifications of Google+ that follow you around. I just logged into analytics yesterday and saw the new redesign and I just... my jaw literally dropped. Who the Hell did this?! Is this is a joke? A bad dream? What did we do? Who at Google did we piss off to deserve this? More importantly what's going on in the world of design? Everywhere I look I see designs that look like the crap I used to turn out.

For a moment I even ventured to think that maybe that radioactive water from Japan finally hit the west coast in full force.

Google's new redesign combined with Kotaku, Gawker, and TechCrunch's new redesign, Ubuntu's Unity and Gnome's, and the new Yahoo mail is making 2011 + 2012 the beginning of an era of atrocious UI. Even Microsoft is joining in, by removing the start button. Maybe the designer shortage last year caused companies to hire up a lot of beginner designers.

More likely this is all because Steve Jobs passed away and now every designer in town is trying to take his place. The king of UX has died, the throne is up for grabs, and everyone's eyeing it. Desperately trying to mimic Steve's "forcefully creative" attitude and ignoring all logic and design laws, these new designers are hell bent on overly simplifying and minimizing every interface until there's nothing left. Desperate for fame and glory the designers will infiltrate every company they can find that's hiring. "You will like it! You will get used to it! I know what's best!" The designers will scream to their users.

I bet you it will get worse.

I got used to the new gmail thread display, although I agree that the old way was more suggestive, but the missing + in Chrome still bugs me.

Currently there's no quick link to switch to Google Groups from homepage. I don't know if they're willing to kill Usenet and Groups for G+

He's spot on. The removal of the plus to create a new tab in Chrome is bad design, period.

I hadn't noticed the lack of the logo link until someone else pointed it out. Why would anyone reduce ease of navigation, particularly from an object that is going to be there anyway?

I use Gmail as my main email application, and have since they first launched it. They've started to annoy me with the interface changes. I think they've lost some of the intuitive simplicity that made Gmail great. It feels about 10% like Yahoo's extraordinarily horrific web email, and that's a big step down.