Dear Gmail, please stop taking your UX cues from the spamsite school of design? | Hacker News Reader

Dear Gmail, please stop taking your UX cues from the spamsite school of design?

21 pointsdoomlaser16 comments

http://i.imgur.com/mG1pWSN.png

Why would I want to write letters in a little box in the corner of my screen, with the center full of a list of irrelevant information?

Imagine this on the desktop, "Oh, time to write code! Lets fire up the IDE, fill the center of my screen with my list of source files, and get to writing in a little window in the corner!"

Google's solution to this problem appears to be this:<p>"You want to focus on writing? You can do that! Here's a popup window!"

Haven't you heard of tabs? This is a desktop web interface. Users almost never want popups, as they create a mess of interleaving windows instead of a list of buttons to switch between contexts in a single click.

My strongest association with popup windows is with the "hot singles in your area" side of the internet. I know I'm not alone in this thinking, and it's a shame that Google is forcing this connection on users when their team has put so much consistent effort in the elimination of spam and noise in the actual inbox.

Please rethink your strategy?

I agree, as soon as I saw the new compose interface I was extremely put off. I very much dislike any site that tries to build their own windowing system, as it always seems to be a harbinger of more bad things to come.

Right now I'm fine with it because it actually functions just fine, but I'm quite wary of future change.

I love the new layout because my emails often refer to other emails, and now I can copy and paste between messages without having to have two browser tabs employed.

>Why would I want to write letters in a little box in the corner of my screen, with the center full of a list of irrelevant information?

One way that this design seems nicer than the previous one is that it allows you to browse through your old messages while composing a new one. In the old design, you would have to do the equivalent of closing the compose window every time you wanted to look something up and then know that you have to go to the drafts folder to continue writing. I imagine that often people would think they would have to start over again which would result in the drafts folder growing with many iterations.

I understand the critique presented in the OP, though. Perhaps they should allow resizing the window or go back to the old design and modify it to make it easier to go back to the most recent draft.

If I want to use two windows to edit an email, I would use two windows to edit email. This is their desktop browser interface.

If I want to pop out my compose window from the browser, I can drag the tab out from the browser myself.

Doing that kind of thing automatically through haphazard invented interface schemes makes browsing the web on the desktop a worse experience.

95% of my outgoing emails on gmail have less than 5 lines, it's like a telegram. For more extensive letters that require "focus" as you say I can use google drive/docs which gives me a full blank page for me to focus on and then I can share it with the recipient.

I think Google puts enough resources into these solutions to ensure that the majority of users will be satisfied.

You seem to be part of a minority and that's not a bad thing, diversity is good and there is a diversity of email clients out there for you to choose from.

I fucking hate this attitude. "If you don't like it, leave." We're not writing because we've perused all the alternatives, settled on this version of GMail, and are unhappy. We're writing because GMail was the best thing we found, we settled in to use it, THEN they changed things for the worse.

I'd be perfectly happy with your attitude if there was a "go back to the old interface" button, but no, they removed that after six months and now we're stuck with the thing we spent those six months complaining about.

http://i.imgur.com/mG1pWSN.png

I just discovered this. If you press escape while writing in the new compose window, it will erase the entire body of the message without a way to undo.

Try it.

I tried it. My message disappeared from the UI, but showed up in my "Drafts" folder. Perhaps not the most intuitive behavior, but totally recoverable.

I believe the new compose window is inspired by Sparrow, which used to have the same rage-inducing flaw, but they eventually fixed it.

Tried it, content was saved in the Drafts folder. That seems like "a way to undo" to me.

With the new compose interface, for the first time I thought of the possibility of switching out of gmail.

It is completely awkward and unintuitive to use, and still has glitches (like attachments display).

Use the basic HTML interface and there will be no such problem. https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html

Press D and you can use a separate tab just fine.

This is like telling the chef how to cook the meal.

Here's an idea use a third party email client!

Can you give a little more context to what you're saying?

edit: nvm, gmail

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5G9PZwmWq2Q/UOTbCe-zqqI/AAAAAAAAAB...

A screenshot of the new UI paradigm they're beginning to enforce, if you haven't seen it already.

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