this is better known as 'mystery meat' navigation and google is one of its most famous adherents
but then again, google has shown again and again that they know absolutely nothing about UX or UI
but then again, google has shown again and again that they know absolutely nothing about UX or UI
I'm going through this right now - we're translating a native mobile app into a bunch of languages, and let me tell you, getting a dense UI to fit right in multiple languages is an extremely iterative exercise that saps your development velocity like nothing else.
A natural and popular reaction to this is to go "then we'll speak in a universal language - pictographs!", except complex concepts can almost never be expressed properly in iconography, especially iconography that isn't well-established internationally.
I have a strong suspicion that Google's forays into all-iconography UIs is an attempt to reduce the amount of translation (and subsequent tweaking) they need to do.
I would venture to say that more than 60-70% would be English, followed by the romance languages and perhaps German ending up with more than 90% of users among 5-6 languages.
there is no reason to make 90% of your users suffer for a possible inconvenience created by 10% of your users.
As of the last quarterly results, 55% of Google's income is coming outside of the US[1]. China has more than double the number of internet users than the US[2], and this is increasing rapidly. We also know that Google has a mind to capture the burgeoning Chinese market, so the relevance of this number to them is pretty substantial. India and Japan combined also equals the US's internet user count.
If you look at the top-10 in that list, it accounts for about 1.4 billion internet users. Of those, about 309 million come from English-speaking countries. 462 million if you're including all western European languages (romance languages).
We know that, by sheer economic force, wealthy developed countries occupy the lion's share of Google revenues (the USA represents ~10% of all internet users, but 45% of Google's revenues). In terms of raw users impacted though, that's quite different. Google has no lack of users from non-English countries.
But forget all of this for a second and assume that your numbers are in the ballpark. 60-70% English, moving up to 90% if you include western European "romance" languages (Latin and Germanic languages aren't the same thing, but whatever). Having just finished translating a large app into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German, I'll say that "romance" languages aren't any easier to translate. French for example tends to run long, and provides huge headaches in any UI that's even remotely space constrained. German tends to mess up line breaks with long compound words, and there are a puzzling number of common verbs in Portuguese and Spanish that run much longer than you would expect them to. All of that requires babysitting and constant iteration to ensure everything fits, reads write, and works right.
And you can see this with Google - they haven't gone all pictographic in their UIs. Instead they've most heavily iconified parts of their UI that are space-constrained. Toolbars are the canonical example. These are the components that most common make people tear their hair out and run screaming into the woods when translating.
[1] http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...
I also dislike the way they hide common functions (like delete) until you've selected an item. I can understand their reasoning: they probably thought it would make for a clutter-free interface. It took me a while to get used to the 'select-email-then-make-command-visible' pattern. I still find this very unnatural. It is common in some desktop applications and it works because you might be manipulating the properties of an object in some way. But for an email interface, it's overkill and the wrong pattern (in my opinion). Delete is a such a common email function it should be visible at all times. Most people know they have to select a message before they can delete it, but I found I was looking first to see that the command was available before I made any selection.
Also, I note on the "more" button in GMail, they have a hint that says "select messages to see more actions" which might suggest that other people are hunting for commands not visible in the interface?
(Finally, I can't help but make one more observation - the way that the Gmail compose email box appears in the lower right corner of the browser window - I just find this bizarre and not helpful)
incredibly shocking that within an organization as large and as wealthy such incompetence can rise to such a high level to dictate such a gigantic leap backwards and no one is around to laugh at the imbecilic change.