Why do people hate the new Gmail compose window?
pg tweeted last night that it is "so awful", and I've seen similar comments elsewhere. Genuinely curious as to what the complaint is.
- Vertical reading space is limited
- The toolbar is aligned at the bottom of my screen which causes me to run into the OS X dock, which I set visible on hover
- It compresses all message recipients (To, CC, ...) into a single row which makes you have to double-check if everyone's in the right place
- The formatting popover appears over your content if you want it to persist
- I feel verbally limited by its small writing area
- They haven't solved the "too many IM and compose windows are open" problem. When you get into this situation, things feel really crowded and messy.
- The hover state on the formatting toolbar "+" is jarring because the item you hovered over changes underneath you, making you (sub?)consciously worry about a misclick since it will launch a damn-obtrusive Google Drive dialog
- Between the appearance of Gmail as a whole, and this as an addition, my feeling of information overload when dealing with email has only increased. Gmail just isn't very "zen."
Sums it up the best. Going through the points mentioned in their review list (on https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2645922?p=newcompose&...), I feel by 'clean', it's just an attempt to Appleify* the gmail experience.
*designing stuff specifically preventing individual users from using it as they desire
In the future, expect to be able to write email from Gmail to your Google+ circles, though. Fuller integration is coming and I don't like this as much.
More generally, I don't like that there's a window within my Gmail tab. I don't like being invited to mess around with window-sizing and -placement instead of just being left to write my e-mail. It reminds me of MDI, but without the saving grace of being able to maximise the child window. Why have I got to use a horrible little subwindow instead of something closer to full width?
I can't see how it's supposed to be an improvement. What does it do better than the old way?
But in general I also feel that things just seem really cluttered when you compose e-mails in a window alongside your chats. I usually have 4+ chats going, and it usually hides a couple when I compose the e-mail. It also just _appears_, as fast as a popup, over my field of view on the page --- I don't find that transition very pleasing, TBH. One might argue it's the same for gchat windows, but maybe I just got used to those. Or maybe it's time for a revamp for those, too. (Which might actually be coming soon, anyway)
The 'user interface designer' who came up with this, and the Product Manager who approved this should (imo) be stood against the nearest wall and shot. GMail has been on a steady downhill path from when the 'new design'ers ran amok.
What does the new compose window gain you? Nothing. It's smaller and more cramped for no good reason. Oh sure, you can see the emails in your inbox while composing, but I almost never need to do that.
I contribute a lot to tech mailing lists on Google Groups, so I spend a lot of time writing long, detailed technical responses to emails. I prefer having a big screen to do my composition. Making it smaller for no obvious benefit annoys me.
The window is not that tiny - compare it to the chat window, for example. And since so many of my emails reference other emails, it's nice to be able to browse my inbox at will without opening new browser frames.
I was thrown off a bit by the auto-hiding of CC and From fields, but it's habit by now to use Tab and Shift-Tab to navigate the form elements. Thankfully, it's still about as keyboard-accessible as before, since I don't like to use my mouse much.
I have no idea how to do simple things, and each time I want to do those things I spend a few minutes noodling around the interface hovering over various parts of the UI hoping for a tool tip.
1. You can compose multiple emails at a time
2. You can copy-past from/to draft/existing emails/new emails
3. You don't need to change windows when you need to write an email. Works just like how google chat and facebook chat work embedded within the main page....it doesn't interrupt your flow.
When they came out with it months back, my first reaction was -- "wow that's brilliant!".
Personally, I like changing my flow to work on an email. Chat is different - I want to do that inline with other things. Email though requires a different focus level (or it should) thus having a dedicated page works better for me.
With the new interface, it makes me pause for a second when I want to get something done quick. I imagine I'll get used to it and you all will too.
But, particularly regarding the latter, I don't know yet how many phone calls to explain this to my parents and walk them through it repeatedly until they remember it (for lack of having an effective reference to consult).
- Its small but not tiny.
- It allows me to reference previous emails while composing a new email. I think this helps a lot.
They could have had a tab-based solution too where the new email would be in a separate tab. But this one keeps the new email in view which is better.
The rich text toolbar is gone (the keyboard controls are still there), and the toolbar that is there hides most of its icons until you hover over the '+' icon, even though it doesn't save any space.
The second is the only one I see as negative, but I can understand that people would dislike the first, too.
less focused
hate popups