Why The New Gmail Sucks
startupq8.com
startupq8.com
Seeing her cry about this made me change the way I think about what some users go through when they experience unexpected UI changes. I remember hearing people say they got confused by Windows 8 tiles, and didn't think it was such a big deal. After seeing my mom cry over a UI change, I think there are better ways to implement UI changes than simply shoving them down people's throat. Sure, if it must be done, it must be done (UI change), but don't shove it down people's throats unexpectedly and with no hand-holding at all.
But what can be done about it? Good design is important, but sometimes things have to be changed, and ultimately a lot people just don't like change. Even if it's the best design in the world, somebody, somewhere will struggle with it being different. I think some "hand holding" as you suggest would be a good idea, but I'm not sure how that could be done in practice.
UI changes, no matter how great, are always going to piss off someone. A lot of the time that someone probably has a very good reason to be pissed off. BUT the changes might also benefit a lot of people who aren't as vocal. We shouldn't hold back innovation because we're scared of pissing people off. Of course we also shouldn't change just for the sake of it.
[This isn't directed specifically at the parent but at the issue in general].
The root cause is the traditional old style vs substance. This fits your observation that its harder to use, both to read and to keyboard. But its not marketed / designed as a tool to do anything, its a fashion accessory, so its irrelevant if its usable. What matters is if its shiny. That led you astray into the whole ageism anti-hipster thing. I also laugh at hipster kids, but the problem in this individual scenario has nothing to do with age.
Imagine if a hardware store released the iHammer and it was just like a conventional hammer, but cost much more so you could show off how rich you must be, and was painted blue, they made the hammer head pointy to be edgy and cool, had lace tied around the handle, and shipped it in a really cool origami clear plastic box. Anyone in search of a productive carpenters tool is going to be horribly disappointed and make fun of the iHammer, but thats not the point, the correct reason to buy a iHammer is to show off to their peers.
iDevices are no longer useful. That's OK. They're supposed to be fashion accessories, not useful devices.
Unfortunately the issue is the lack of a quality alternative. My best friend was an iPhone user, then switched to a Samsung Galaxy S2 because he wanted to be able to use is phone as a mass storage device, among other things. Eventually he switched back to the iPhone because the Galaxy was so unreliable. After less than a year, his phone would just silently shut off a couple times throughout the day. And he's far from the only person I know who's had Android reliability problems. My old HTC Incredible would stop responding to input a couple times a week until I yanked the battery.
All that said, I'm sticking with Android because I have a high tolerance for pain. iDevices may no longer be useful, but at least they work.
For analogy I have nothing against women who wear wedding dresses to a wedding instead of sweatpants and tee shirt, or people who market wedding dresses to women who want to wear them while getting married, it certainly fills a need for them very well, and profitably. The point I'm making is its pointless for a gang of construction workers to complain about women's wedding dresses, all "LOL they're selling wedding dresses how useless because the train will get stuck in the bulldozer hydraulics" and the other construction dude all "LOL yeah and how does she intend to get the cement stains out of that fabric anyway".
If your particular situation values style over usefulness more than any other device on the market, and some device fits your needs better than other devices on the market, hey, have fun with it.
Or maybe rephrased a basic product design goal is a fairly objective observation (although I may be wrong, but I don't think so). However, a (subjective) discussion about some users desires being trivial or non-trivial is way far away from that discussion.
I am making the claim that iDevices are not just a fashion accessory and in fact are a highly productive, useful mobile device for what people do with mobile devices. The success in the iPhone has been in large part due to its utility - the entire phone industry basically works like an iPhone does now.
Competing for customers remains a balancing act between increasing usability and the aesthetics/fashion of the device - clearly a gold iPhone has little to do with usability, but will sell heavily because it has a fashion edge in some quarters. But none of this would matter if the device wasn't still useful. My construction site superintendent step dad moves to an iPhone because it worked better than his BlackBerry. Rail yard workers I worked with are moving to rugged-case iPads over ruggedized PCs because the latter are difficult to use. Airline mechanics use them to log their daily activities and order parts. These folks don't necessarily move the needle of sales the way fashion does, but they wouldn't use an iPhone if it didn't help their job.
I don't understand what light colours have to do with hipsters though, most UIs tend towards lighter colours, it's the old school unix coonsoles that preferred dark.
I can't imagine wanting to be the teacher or classmate of said 11 year old if he/she is always "bitching" about stuff. And if that behavior continues into adulthood, I can't imagine being the boss or coworker of him/her. Such negative social qualities might be detrimental to his/her professional success and social well-being.
I wouldn't be able to say for certain until I have kids, but it might be beneficial to teach your 11 year old how to tactfully and constructively discuss the negative aspects of something rather than just "bitching" about it.
This was a real concern for me. I made sure my children (19 months, 4 years old) could unlock my iPhone with iOS 7, before upgrading their iPad Mini.
Unfortunately I forgot about Spotlight Search, and the older one was complaining about it being missing after the upgrade (he knows he can find apps by typing in the first letter).
I showed him how to activate it but I can imagine many people never (re)discovering the feature, and possibly limiting the number of apps they install because they can't search for them easily.
http://www.ibtimes.com/steve-jobs-dies-leaves-plans-4-years-...
http://www.forevermac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/picture...
Having been an initial iPhone Luddite, I remember the posts I'd read discussing the detractors of various models. The criticism of this update, and a number of others since Jobs died, have an incredibly similar tenor.
What I find inspirational is that by force of personality alone, Steve Jobs convinced so many customers that the products' let-downs were much less meaningful than those customers and proponents would have normally felt.
That is a truly remarkable skill.
IOS now looks like it was slapped together in a hurry. I can't believe that this is the culmination of Jonny Ive's vision. He can do better. He has done better.
Why? If a UI works for people, why does it have to be changed? That seems to me to be at least part of the problem: software designers think things have to be changed, when it's really just that they want to change them, for whatever reason, and don't stop to think about the impact.
a lot people just don't like change
A lot of people have things that work perfectly well for them and don't like having to re-learn their workflow whenever some software designer has a bright idea. I'm one of them: I still run a KDE 3 desktop on Linux because it works for me and I don't like having my UI messed with just because somebody designed some new eye candy.
I think the newest version of Skype does let you break things into new windows, but to me it seems that it should be the default.
My main point is: the UI was already great, it didn't need any changes.
Finding examples of cases where this did not work are no argument against all changes.
And as far as people not liking change. This is not only about re-learning. Change on itself is often met with tough resistance. And this resistance is often rationally hard to justify. Your example may or may not be like that (I don't have enough perspective to tell), but perhaps re-learning would have been more than compensated by the amount of time saved due to new features.
Of course this is always possible in general terms. But I was talking about a specific set of cases: redesigns of UIs that already work and that already have a huge base of existing users who will have to relearn what they know. In my experience, it's extremely rare for that kind of change to be "for the better".
you'll need to move away from the sweet spot the majority settled with to get to another (hopefully better adjusted) local optimum.
And in the process, you will have to move through a "pit" of UI suck where lots of people have significantly worse productivity for a significant period of time. And for what?
Finding examples of cases where this did not work are no argument against all changes.
I didn't argue against all changes; as noted above, I was talking specifically about software UI changes that force existing users to re-learn things for no good reason.
perhaps re-learning would have been more than compensated by the amount of time saved due to new features.
How much time saved? And how long before that savings pays back the huge cost of the switch, per the above?
And can these numbers even be measured anyway? Sure, Google can measure to the millisecond how long it takes for you to move the mouse from one place to another, and no doubt they have numbers to show that the new GMail UI shaves critical milliseconds off certain common operations. But can they measure the frustration caused by changes like this? Can they measure the emails that don't even get written because people get fed up with their new UI? Can they measure the cost of keeping people within their walled garden?
This problem is not limited to Google, of course; I think it's endemic in the software UI world. I think software UIs are like fashions: changes are largely driven not by functionality but by an arms race for users' attention.
The new GMail UI is most emphatically not good design.
I know it's not perfect, but little ever is.
Installing a mail client, debugging weird IMAP/POP/SMTP issues that come up from time-to-time - not fun.
My mom already knows (for some definition of 'knows') how to use a web browser to view web pages. Using it for email is much easier.
Also, it's easy for me to login into her account and see what happened when she said her mail didn't go through or whatever.
And of course, because she didn't have a hotmail account, her contacts were stored locally, so there was no backup.
https://plus.google.com/106938703242944328523/posts/AU5F7oeV...
I have added red marks to the screenshot, so it's bit easier to find those buttons.
Not that I'm saying that it's OK for them to ignore the problem, but the issue you're seeing is not experienced by almost all users.
My mother is smart enough to know not to randomly sign up to things but this means she now has to try and navigate the 'advanced' path through a UI.
Why is there a need to keep innovating on the UI for sending and receiving email? Why isn't this a solved problem? Why can't the innovators move on to some new problem whose solution would create much more value?
Unfortunately I don't see an easy answer to this.
I understand that this is the current goal of the companies you named, but, to put it bluntly, why should I care? My goal is to not have to deal with change just for the sake of change, or because some company wants to keep capturing new users. (Which is why, as I've said in other posts in this thread, I don't use GMail, don't use MS or Apple products, don't keep upgrading my Linux desktop just because somebody invented a new UI, etc.)
Also, "keep getting new users" isn't a sustainable goal anyway. Facebook already has more than a billion users; they don't have too much further to go before everyone that has Internet access at all (apart from a few outliers like me) will have a Facebook account. What do they do then?
We could also just keep using lynx for web browsing. It worked fine.
I'll gladly admit that having a browser that does graphics is a huge improvement over a browser that only displays text, like lynx. But browsers have been supporting graphics since what, 1995? Earlier?
Since graphical browsers appeared, IMO, there has been exactly one UI innovation in browsers that was worth the effort to re-learn things: the Chrome UI, that basically got rid of the UI except for the address/search bar and the browser window itself. I'm fine with having to re-learn where all the menu options are if I need them, in exchange for that simplification. But that happened in what, 2008?
Of course there have been plenty of changes behind the scenes in browsers, such as security fixes, support for HTML 5 and updates to Javascript, etc. None of those affect the UI, and I'm not talking about those kinds of changes. I'm talking specifically about changes to the UI that force people to re-learn things for no good reason.
How you do it? I feel like typing gmail in chrome versus the url is less error prone and is more easy.
(ps: I had the same problem)
I can understand. My mother is her 60s and is now a Ubuntu user, has broadband, uses Skype & Gmail.
It took her a long time to get used to it. It is funny she has never used Microsoft or Apple or other computer before on a long term level. She thought, Windows for example was a very user "unfriendly".
But back to the complexity. I remember when she was learning it was very frustrating both for her and me. I think it is easy, and she didn't. Now the other day there was a post on HN about how to start a Boeing airliner. I at that moment understood what it is like being faced with a new interface with new rules and paradigms. If I had start a commercial aircraft I would start crying too probably.
Then of course every time Google or Ubuntu messes with their interface, it causes her and me (having to re-teach her) considerable stress.
Sometimes I think corporations go through re-design just because they can. Like there is an timer set to go off every 6 months and designers, new bosses, CEOs all see it go ding and say "aha, let's redesign it". Sometimes it doesn't make it better, it just makes it different even if it was already pretty good.
Reminds me of when I was showing my mom how to use a new piece of software and she opened a notebook and wrote it down step by step. That's how she starts her airliners. Now if only documentation was not considered an afterthought these days.
Yeah, the send button used to be in a horrible place in Gmail. Nowhere close to the editor, and oddly detached from the compose area. I always had trouble finding it.
Thankfully they fixed it in the UI update the author's complaining about. Now it's where I'd expect it to be...attached to the email composer.
It's the reason Apple have done so well - they didn't invent anything new which hadn't already been done, they just added better UI that appealed to the masses.
I have to say, I agree with most of what is written in that blog, I've gotten used to some of the changes now but still a lot of the time keep looking around to see where the hell something has gone (the attach files expands out to reveal more options, why the hell is add URL link under attach options?)
Alas, as a keen WebApp dev myself, I have found myself having to Google for how to do tasks I once did easily. Such searches eventually uncover the highly counter intuitive means to do the previously simple thing (via someone's blog post), or reveal that the feature has been dropped from the new and improved version. Such issues are not a subjective matter of color choice or icon design, but the reduction of functionality and confounding of user interaction.
Largely Google wins the efforts to improve their products, but I've seen a half dozen such failings in the last year that I am surprised managed to ship. Hopefully their batting average continues to improve.
The Old Google was the latter (very usable, not beautiful).
The New Google is the former (looks visually pleasing, very unintuitive to use).
I curse every time I compose an email now in Gmail. Why have they hidden all the controls? Why is EVERYTHING one click away? Is ANYTHING gained AT ALL by HIDING all those buttons that are there to be used?
Heck, I still can't tell you how to make a hyperlink. I think you have to mouse over the hidden buttons. Or do you click on the hidden buttons? I think if you click on the hidden buttons then you end up clicking a button that's next to the "hyperlink* button, by mistake.
Come on, Google.
[1] most of the time, web based interfaces are less efficient than many COBOL screen based terminals, fragile, laggy, non-burst oriented.
I agree with everything you've written above, and unfortunately agree with you that they've nearly perfectly designed the UI to match "some population".
I firmly believe that proof of space aliens on earth will not be techno-thriller like spaceplanes in area 51 or theatrical drama like a UFO landing on the whitehouse lawn (we'd probably shoot it down anyway) but more likely we'll finally prove space aliens are among us when we properly identify the UI designers at APPL, GOOG, MSFT are all Vulcans and Orion Space Pirates which explains why normal earthlings can't make any sense out of what they're pushing to us.
The "modern" problem with UI seen over the past few years isn't conservatism, or ageism, or noob orientation, or pushing hardware tech for the sake of increased sales, the problem is the focus groups being used are composed of homeless Alpha Centaurians on LSD instead of humans, so naturally the endusers have an intense WTF moment when they're subjected to something that makes perfect sense if you have eyeballs that can see ultraviolet and seven fingers per tentacle.
Several jobs ago I worked at a place where they formally directed us to think about any written communication we generate, and if it sounds like something you'd read in a Dilbert cartoon, think it over a bit more. Modern UI designers need to implement a similar rule, if Cthulhu rises and decides to use your phone, or Vulcans land and click on your website, and they love it and feel you designed your product specifically for members of a horror mythos or space aliens, as a designer you're probably doing something wrong unless you're a hollywood sci fi prop designer.
You're right but this is an anomaly to me. How is it that Google hires PHDs in HCI to design this stuff and they're still getting it wrong?
Perhaps I have misconceptions about the organizational structure of large companies but they do hire these people for a reason no?
Possibly because it's all about Larry Page's personal preferences. I don't actually have any idea, but it's a plausible reason.
I don't think they're getting it wrong; I think they're just judging success by a different metric than you are. As other comments upthread have suggested, their success metric appears to be how many users they can keep within their walled garden. So the HCI experts aren't figuring out how to make Google's apps easier to use; they're figuring out how to make them harder to escape.
Case in point: a bunch of people in this thread have pointed out various things wrong with GMail's web UI, but nobody, as far as I can tell, has said "Screw this, I'm using a different email client." [Edit: I have now spotted one such person, but that's still effectively none in a thread with this many posters.] (For the record, I use KMail on Linux, the KDE 3 version, and I don't use GMail anyway, for reasons which go way beyond its UI.) To Google's HCI experts, that's success.
Now it's one click to display the pop-up settings menu. Another click to reveal the video quality pop-up menu. Another click to select a video quality setting. And now that they've shoehorned all settings into one menu, you need another click to dismiss the entire settings menu. So they've gone from two clicks to four. Plus, there's the glaring inelegance of displaying a pop-up menu and then another pop-up menu within your pop-up menu.
I know Google have UX designers - I would love to know what their rationale is for their UX choices. I'm guessing, like Gmail, part of the design ethos was to "streamline" the interface or sweep away what they perceived as interface clutter. But all they've actually done is clumsily obscure features that were easier to access previously.
Maybe they fear that if they don't trap the users, Facebook will. Either way, the continued high user figures at Yahoo show that it's possible. To do it, they need to stop being a search engine (to discover others content, leave the garden), and become a portal, the only web experience you'll ever need.
I think this becomes necessary because on a tablet, people use apps, and if those aps are deep enough, they may never escape them. You could make a tablet that just ran the facebook ap, an a subset of users would be happy. They need a counter trap.
To me, to them, any other GUI changes that crept in are likely incidental. Does it tie in with Google Plus? Will it work on a tablet?, Does it look like our tablet ap?, would be the primary question.
I suspect that the problem is that for established products, like gmail, "easy to use" just means "the exact way it is now": user familiarity trumping every other metric.
And I suspect there is only so many times a HCI design team can say "we ran a study and we should do nothing" before they are deemed useless. Eventually things have to be changed to preserve jobs and since the only metrics of "good design" in HCI, currently, are "ease of use" and "looks good" it usually results in something that "looks" easier than the old one through hiding (or removing) features and padding the shit out of everything.
This is a shortsighted answer. The acceptance of this as a truism is the kind of office culture that is toxic to a company's long term health. If you're user tests say, "we shouldn't change anything" then the people making the new designs are the ones who should be fired because they can't improve the interface.
As for familiarity, you wouldn't test current Gmail users against a new interface. Of course they would perform better against the old one. You'd get a group who'd never used either one and run your tests (unless you're incompetent).
Why not? If you're trying to assess the impact of a new interface, surely the fact that it's going to confuse existing users is important?
You'd get a group who'd never used either one
So if this group likes the new one better, that outweighs any amount of confusion caused with existing users? That's basically what you're saying here.
On your second point: I'm not saying the control group picking the new interface "outweighs any amount of confusion caused with existing users", but it certainly outweighs some.
You're assuming that "better" is some objective quality that is independent of the history of your product and who uses it. It's not. Part of what makes a UI "good" is that it's similar to other UIs that users already know, so it takes them less time to learn it. By this criterion, the UI you have right now is "better" than any other one, because your existing users already know it. Any metric of "better" that doesn't take that into account is, IMO, wrong.
it certainly outweighs some.
How much? Your prescription gives no way of judging that that I can see, since you explicitly ruled out considering input from existing users.
Everyone has used email at this point except babies and tech averse grandpas, and all clients look more or less the same, i.e. like old gmail.
For things that I have used, there are real, identifiable problems: the instant search results break the back button. Link tracking on search results means you cannot copy an URL.
I feel that there is a definite trend towards poor UI, irrespective of the user's prior history with the products.
Reasons for redesign:
> "Google’s actively trying to make email less fussy and formal--or, in other words, to make it a little more like instant messaging."
> "email is just too much work"
> "Jason Cornwell, Gmail’s lead designer, explains, one of the ways to do that is simply to "give you permission to write shorter messages."
Why is gmail trying to compete against iMessage or Whatsapp or fb chat? Email IS for work and should be optimized for it. Email is a useful medium because you are allowed to write long messages and permitted to respond later during the week. A friend would not read your text if it was 500 words long.
For users that like to use the pop out layout for compose, hiding the formatting may be needed to save space.
For users that opted for a full screen layout for compose, the full formatting options should be available as a default given that space is not a limitation.
The point that I was trying to get across in that article was not that all messages should be shorter. Rather, that the form of the composition UI sets expectations for what the message itself should look like. The form of Gmail's old compose set the expectation that it was a formal medium; that writing something short might not be appropriate, and that writing an email should be like writing a memo in a word processor. That makes messages feel less immediate, less personal, and as a result raises the bar for sending shorter and/or personal messages.
The goal was not to prevent users from writing long messages, but rather to provide a better balance between the two. Ultimately, though, this isn't a personal vs work issue. Facilitating short messages is arguably even more important in work settings where everybody tends to be inundated by large amounts of legitimate work-related email. There is real value in having a UI that gives users signals that it is ok to write shorter messages.
At the same time, on a 1366x768 browser window I can fit more than 3 paragraphs of lorem ipsem from http://www.lipsum.com/ in the default Gmail compose window before it even starts to scroll. In full screen mode at the same resolution you can fit 5 paragraphs before it starts to scroll. The UI isn't preventing you from writing something longer if that's what you need to do.
I don't have much issue with the spacing in compose. I have an issue with hiding the formatting and functionality of the email.
I was not suggesting ignoring personal use cases. Given the popularity of Gmail, a lot of people uses email to do work for personal use. However, SMS/whatsapp/fb chat is a much more effective medium for personal use cases. Picking up the phone to reply a text feels a lot more personal and less intimidating than email. The new redesign does not make it less intimidating to use email.
I agree that Gmail should "influence" users on their behaviors by changing the UI to some extent. However, you should facilitate the user's existing use cases. Most people would prefer to send an SMS for personal messages and send email for work. Forcing email to look more minimalistic like an SMS by removing formatting / forward button is not user friendly. Another example is the pop in compose button. I like to see other emails before I compose - naturally, you would think i would love the new pop in since I can see emails as I compose. However, I am used to having one tab open for composing and another for reading emails.
Out of curiosity: How do you determine whether a redesign is successful or not? Are there particular metrics you pay attention to?
There is really nothing objective that is pointed to as to why it "sucks". I get it you don't like it. I imagine most people do, here is an XKCD comic about the situation your in http://xkcd.com/1172/
If you're writing a marketing e-mail with HTML or something longer, it's probably not great. If you like to use a lot of rich text formatting then it's probably not great, but for actual, pithy e-mail, in plain text, quickly, I think it works really well. Keeping your messages in the background to cross-reference things without opening 12 windows is awesome.
That said - I did have to search for a second to figure out how to edit the subject. A couple of quick tweaks or the addition of a "message settings" button for more admin-type tasks would make it just a bit better.
Everyone's a UI critic.
As it should be... everyone uses the UI for mass market products. Very few people admin the app or have the ability to access and analyze the source.
The post repeatedly mentions functionality that used to be one click away, but is now multiple clicks away. That is about as objective as measures come. You may not mind it, but you can't say it's just subjective.
The post also points out how UI controls shift relative positions based on the view being presented. One could define a metric that assesses the effect, and anybody calculating the metric would get the same result. Again, you may not mind controls jumping about as you work, but you can't say it's not objective.
I also use GMail mostly for personal emails, not professionally. I wonder if that's part of it. But, even then, I use Notes for professional emails, because I have to. The GMail changes work well for how I use it, but there's also the fact that I constantly compare it to Notes.
It's incredibly insulting. But it is aimed at people who don't know they are being insulted so it works out perfectly for them.
What I do not understand is why it would be so hard to give us options.
Just give us the option of having the old compose box back, with all the controls visible, all the form fields visible, for the other 50% of people who know what they are doing.
And most of the rest of google works for me with javascript disabled, which is not a trivial thing to maintain.
99% of emails don't include formatting. 99% of users never set anything but "TO" instead of the anachronistic BCC and CC thingies (how many emailers even know what a "Carbon Copy" even is?)
On a handheld where real-estate is at a premium? Those features are tucked away semi-hidden. And for the sake of consistency, that UI is mirrored onto the web form.
Also, changing the subject of a reply is hidden for very good reasons - many applications use the subject of a reply for threading. Changing that subject line is going to break the user's expectations of how threading works. Even if Gmail handles the threading with grace, the e-mail client at the other end may not, and that can causes a mess of broken expectations. Better to leave this seldom-used feature (changing the subject of a reply) hidden to avoid the trouble.
The inability to fullscreen and the tiny composition window are, imho, unacceptable though.
Also I do not see why even after deliberately setting a (B)CC this is collapsed back into a single TO-line (only visually - when you click CC again you see how it's actually configured to be sent under the hood, but this has confused me a few times already).
It might not be the right approach, but I see why they did it.
The new interface is so poor that a legit suggestion now is to use a dedicated mail client so that you dont have to use an interface that was once useful. Terrible!
The problem seems to be communicating changes. Rather than the basic instructions given when a new design is introduced companies like Google should be producing detailed 30 minute walkthroughs of the new design and giving users the option to watch that.
That's the lazy way.
I even doubt that's a solution; the average user won't read one-liner warning/error boxes.
The new design makes email more lightweight and fluid; replying to a thread or composing a new message feels less like work and less ceremonious.
I agree the formatting options are a pain to use though...
I think Google is definitely on the right track here. I love to be able to compose emails while still clicking around for context in the background. I am perfectly fine shift-clicking to open a new compose window because that is the exception not the common case. Similarly, I don't often change the subject or use formatting in emails, so I don't mind clicking an extra icon to open up those options.
This whole movement about how unequivocally Terrible the new Gmail UI is is the biggest tsunami of nerdrage I've seen in quite some time. But here's the thing: there is a reason and justification for it, and it does work for some people, and there's no going back; so it's time to either adapt or move to some other client with a traditional UI.
We have plenty of chat an other collaboration tools for your vision of email.
However, what all the posts about Gmail fail to do is point to a substitute. I need a web-based mail client which can provide mailboxes with my own domain, fetch mail from outside boxes and send through them, and filter and order my mail according to a set of rules I define. Also, it should not be hosted in the US or by a US based company, and should have at least a decent UI.
I would love to pay for such an alternative but, alas, I doesn't seem to exist today
It's much cleaner and snappier than gmail and yahoo.
1. No Space to write
What? The text box expands as you type to fit the content. I would be very frustrated if it took up most of the screen space for no reason at all and I couldn't see the email I'm replying to.
2. Edit subject (when replying)
When you reply and edit the subject you're starting a new conversation. It's what the big "compose" button is for, except now your conversation starting email contains junk from other emails. I'm happy if this UI change discourages people from doing this.
3. Formatting (when replying)
First valid point, hiding this under a button makes no sense to those who use formatting. I'm just glad if I receive less HTML emails because of this change.
4. Adding cc and bcc (when replying)
Second somewhat valid point. Although I think it's still intuitive while keeping the UI uncluttered.
5. New email (compose)
You have several options to make the area larger. I love that I can look up other emails while composing a new one without the need to open a new window. In fact, I would like to see this while replying. The "feel there is no more space to write anything" is a ridiculous argument to hinder a useful feature.
edit: I would even make the point that if your emails are most often so long that they take up most of the screen you're doing communication wrong.
I think if the Mighty GOOG ever divorces itself from .gov / .mil then we'll see them release sane UIs.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how my theoretical model applies to .com with UI issues like APPL. Perhaps they're a mere manifestation of the Cthulhu Mythos. Or something else... it would hardly be the first time that totally different root causes leads to similar appearing results.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fix-compose-for-gm...
I love it.
It actually really just swaps the user-agent for the ie8 header.
Does that exist for Firefox?
Wow it does exist for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/restore-your-gmail-...
Will examine the source.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-com/gmail/
(It's actually decent too)
In short - they're catering for the typical user, and the typical user doesn't use all the features that the OP thinks they need.
My theory is that the assumption there is some kind of meaningful "Average user" which a product is then built for ultimately destroys utility in software.
If you have 50 features that on average 1% of people use, you can easily reach the false conclusion nobody cares about these features, when on aggregate 90% might use at least one of those features. Thus in aiming for the average, you haven't designed for anyone at all.
For what it's worth, my wife and my mom are totally lost with the new Gmail, and they're the very average typical user.
Thankfully these examples are optional, unlike the author's qualms.
I hate I when organisations like Google, who have no real personal contact with end users, just do a redesign without consulting the people who actually us their products. It's the Alan Day school of design, and it is totally unnecessary.
Nevertheless, a refrigerator that hid everything except the milk when I open the door would be a massive failure.
Also, objectively, from the time I hit the bookmark, to the time I see my inbox, Yahoo is faster than Gmail. Where Yahoo loses is the terrible ugly display ads that loaded in.
ps: you know what other site has an annoyingly small compose space? HN! :)
This was to an account that I have had for years. All that changed was a new device.
I would have paid $5 a month for an ad free experience and exchange support.
Drives me nuts.
If you hate your users and don't know anything, you think systems should be designed logically. Logical, to you, will mean that similar things are put together. Likewise, similar will be defined by occupying the same spot in some weird taxonomy of all things in your head [1]. This will result in putting change the font size, boldface, and indention in a little tray of "things that happen to text". This is either because you are crazy or think your users love playing the $25,000 pyramid. You will then compound your madness by labeling this tray with the not-an-icon of an italicized, underlined, bold letter A.
If you do not wish to be one of these bad people that turn their UI into some sort of Lovecraftian chest of drawers where the contents of each drawer is another chest of drawers, please investigate "task driven user interfaces". They are better. Things that use task driven UIs are illogical and messy and unbalanced and much, much, more pleasant for the people who have to use them.
[1]: This is culturally determined and possibly different for every individual. Nobody else will understand your taxonomy. There is no way to fix this. Sorry.
Really, when has google ever cared about customer service? Heck, the BORG have better customer service than google. And no, I'm not still mad about google getting rid of my beloved Reader... Why do you ask?
There is a separate issue that Gmail hid many options. I personally find this annoying since I don't want to click through things to change things like formatting. However, maybe the average Google user rarely uses the formatting. Also, keyboard shortcuts are faster than any clicking anyways. I assume Google has access to more data about this issue and decided it was worth it. I don't know why they don't provide more configuration options though.
I think the broader trend behind this kind of stubbornness is a move toward opinionated software. The problem with opinionated software is that even in the best case it is more specialized for the needs of one particular group of users. It is not flexible enough to cater to different workflows.
I guess what this means is that consumer software and software for professionals is going to diverge again after converging for many years.
I had to GOOGLE the solution for how to pop out an email. The irony is not lost on me :(
What on earth was wrong with the "pop out your email" button anyway?
If you look at that basic html version and cry about all of the features you're missing, IMO you're really just being a backseat driver. You're not going to like every improvement that they make, but if you like enough of them to render how we used email in the very near past completely unusable, then they're doing a good job.
And as far as frustrating changes go, recently they changed the layout of the grocery store across the street. What should have been a 5 minute shopping trip turned into a 30 minute long ordeal. So I don't have much sympathy for those who can't deal with buttons in new places on a computer screen.
I filed it under "meh" and moved on.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/apr/08/onlinesupp...
If you don't like that, you shouldn't use the old one let alone the new one.
I run my own mail server(s) anyway as I like being in control of the backup processes, having access to recent and archived mail if the Internet has a blip, and being more in control of the interface (I currently use Zimbra, but if they go a direction I don't like I can easily move to something else that supports IMAP but also provides a nice web-based interface). I pay for that in my time (and in having a server to run it on and resource to hold/manage backups, though the cost of that is not particularly high), people pay for gmail by allowing the adverts thing. You pays your money, directly or otherwise, you takes your choice.
For anyone else out there thinking of doing anything in Word then copying and pasting... you can break soooo many things on the web.
The new "mini" compose windows are just insane. It's email, not IM chat.
After this redesign, I have been pushed away. Despite my efforts, I failed to make any sense of it. So now I'm just using the Mac Mail app - certainly not as powerful, but much less frustrating.
Apart from a clean UI, it doesn't milk you for data and is not in collaboration with NSA :)
I jumped ship, and took all my data with me. It felt extremely liberating and honestly, just damn good.
I moved my contacts and calendering to a owncloud-based setup, which literally takes 5 minutes to set up. That way this data is available to all things which can work with the CardDAV and CalDAV standards.
This can easily be done on any webhost, and getting it "under your domain" a no-brainer. As a bonus, you now have your own private Dropbox-like setup as well, with clients across most major platforms.
For Google Drive/Docs, I've yet to see any replacement worth jumping on to, so I've kept that around. I've seen a few candidates mentioned, but they aren't ready/released or mature enough yet.
I haven't tried it myself, but apparently it works well.
First it wants your email address to install, then you have to 'pay with a tweet' or 'pay with a facebook post'
Thankfully it's shoddy programming, you can dismiss the facebook post page without publishing and click the download link:
Will verify this first though, could be something scary...
My quick de-obfuscation effort:
chrome["webRequest"]["onBeforeSendHeaders"]["addListener"](function (a) { var b = a["requestHeaders"]; b[forEach](function (c, d) { if (c["name"]["toLowerCase"]() =="user-agent") { c["value"] = "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)",; }; }); return { requestHeaders: b }; }, { urls: ["http://mail.google.com/*", "https://mail.google.com/*", types: ["main_frame", "sub_frame"] }, ["blocking", requestHeaders]);
Installed it, performs as advertised.
The web version is just when I am not at home or without my laptop.
This is a nice advantage of native applications. I get to control when I upgrade.
Just wait until the number of people that "hate it" will drop.
I'm surprised people haven't figured this out. As we always say, if you're not paying, you're the product and not the customer. So of course Google wants to encourage lots of short emails. Google's incentive in designing the Gmail UI is to create lots of clicks and ad impressions. User satisfaction is secondary and held up mostly by "don't be evil". Google's only incentive is to keep it just tolerable enough that jumping ship isn't worthwhile.
I'm sure Google does have many designers legitimately dedicated to improving the service. But also sure that they're closely monitoring the business moneymaking end as well.
Hide text formatting buttons???
Teeny-tiny reply windows?
I'm not sure what assumptions they were making, but it feels like they want me to use Gmail like it's Twitter.
What's next, a "make this conversation public" button? And it will show on my G+ profile?
1) It's done so you can search your email while typing a reply, maybe find some info and copy/paste it. It's extremely useful.
2) You don't tons of horizontal space to write an email (except for embedded photos). Vertical space scrolls.
3) I'd actually argue that short emails are better than long ones. Learn how to write succinctly, to the point, and there are more chances it will be read.
4) Get a high res display if you need more screen space. 1080p displays are dirt cheap.
I can't say I agree with your other points. Sometimes, you need to write a long email and there's no way around it. an email provider should not be trying to re-invent how people use email, they should embrace how people use email and make it better.
Doesn't seem that problematic to me.
Slight trolling aside, I think this is a fairly obvious example of how a purely numbers & statistic based design process can go off the rails.
Downvote for this. Questioning or criticizing the author's credentials is a poor substitute for questioning or criticizing his thesis.
The author is posting a list of his personal gmail bugbears. We all understand the author doesn't care that you can see the email in the reply window, he'd rather a much bigger space to write.
I think we can safely say that Google test UX changes with actual users. Asking the parent for some data to back up that most users don't like the change is reasonable.
Also making the compose full screen would result in a very wide compose area, which is widely though to slow down reading (eg, of what the gmail users has just written).
I've actually flagged the submission: evaluating UX based on opinionated users without data is simply poor.
But in reality the people whose promotions and bonuses are riding on a successful launch of the redesign are also the ones cherry-picking the metrics of success. It doesn't matter if it's universally hated and actively drives people to use IMAP clients. There will be some bullshit statistic that'll go up. Hell, most metrics are going up anyway for a service like GMail, and it's not like this is being A/B tested.