GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/gmail-designer-arrogance-and-the-cult-of-minimalism/

by centro • 14 years ago

251 222 14 years ago

jonoscript.wordpress.com

abcd_f• 14 years ago

There's nothing wrong with minimalism. Minimalism is about making things simple, but knowing when to stop.

afhof2• 14 years ago

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

noblethrasher• 14 years ago

Or as Alfred Whitehead said: "Seek simplicity and distrust it"

howardr• 14 years ago

many of these issues can changed to be more old-gmail-like http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...

1) remove important markers 2) add labels to actions/buttons

afhof2• 14 years ago

Sure, you could change it back to the old way, but should you have to? I think this is a good question to ask whenever some bothersome thing happens such as a poor redesign.

You /could/ fix it, but should you have to?

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail-interface.htm...

Even closer revert-to-old via the Stylish plugin and CSS hacks.

gringomorcego• 14 years ago

On an unrelated note:

I noticed people always complained about GMail having bad service (like me, when I couldn't open particular pieces of mail for a few days at a time).

How do these problems change when we become paying customers of Google? When I get a Google drive, do I get help in fixing problems? Or is that a lie I want to believe in?

TeHCrAzY• 14 years ago

You get proper email support if you are paying for gapps for domains. I don't know if that's what you mean by paying for gmail.

freditup2• 14 years ago

I always have though GMail is subpar at best when it comes to interface. I feel no desire to justify this opinion, just my personal feelings.

pirateking2• 14 years ago

Same here. I have always preferred native mail clients (originally Thunderbird, and now Mail.app on OS X/iOS).

dasil0032• 14 years ago

Did you ever learn the keyboard shortcuts?

Why I love Gmail is combining 80% of the power of CLI mail clients like mutt with 80% of the visual presentation of native clients.

I process hundreds of emails a day, and that's on top of the coding work I'm expected to do. Being able to work through them with vi-style keyboard shortcuts for everything including rapid labeling is the killer feature that nothing else comes close to.

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

There's something deeper going on here:

The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements being hidden or tucked away behind several clicks for the sake of "minimalism", incorrectly correlating a sterile white page with "simplicity". And they won't stop until the whole page is white and empty with one button and a line of text.

These designers are doing whatever makes them look off the wall bat-shit-creative (of the Lady Gaga variety). Many of these designers have stopped caring about a/b tests and the users and are focusing their designs solely on how it makes them look to the community. They want to be the next Steve Jobs, now that he has passed. And they are going to mimic his arrogance, take his risks, and think it will get them to his level. It will not, it's just pissing us off.

On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. Explaining to the average person why the new gmail UI is abnoxious is like explaining to the average person what's wrong with Michael Bay's films.

josephcooney• 14 years ago

Sound similar to the "designing for the industry, not people" syndrome seen in the world of architecture discussed here: http://www.shareable.net/blog/architectural-myopia-designing...

andrewfelix3• 14 years ago

>These designers are doing whatever makes them look

I doubt Google would let a group of self interested ego fueled creative's override rational principal and analysis. Especially considering this is a flagship Google product with 350M users.

>On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed.

I'm a designer. I've never properly critically analysed the new Gmail design. But I haven't felt the need to. For me it just functions really well.

option_greek4• 14 years ago

Haven't you faced any problem with the toolbar buttons ? they are all lumps of coal with minor variations!

jasonkester• 14 years ago

The worst offence of this type I've come across is in JetBrains' latest crop of IDEs.

In WebStorm, they completely removed the scrollbar in the code editor, and replaced it with this "hidden until you mouseover it" slider thing. That means you have no visual cue where you are in a document, scroll-wise. And no way to quickly grab the scrollbar with the mouse since you have to hover and wait on the right edge of the screen before you can see where you're headed.

Making it worse, they have (normally) really useful gutter over there that displays colored bars describing the health of your code. Those are cool, but they now live on top of the scroll bar so even when its visible it's still pretty hard to find it.

Compare that to their (awesome) ReSharper plugin for VS.NET that preserves the original scrollbar and adds that helpful gutter bar next to it. You can quickly see the health of your code AS WELL AS where you're scrolled in the document. Perfect.

I filed a bug against WebStorm about this and had it immediately closed as "by design". Worse UI. Intentional. And not even a setting you can uncheck to fix it.

I actually uninstalled my paid copy of WebStorm as a result. It'd be an awesome product, but all its advantages are wiped out by not being able to navigate around files at times when I have a mouse in my hand. One bad UI choice to turn a good IDE into shelfware.

macspoofing• 14 years ago

I agree with #3. I have a lot of problems deciphering the icons, in the browser client and the ipad client.

highwind81• 14 years ago

They added a setting to change the icons to text: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-bu...

jcc80• 14 years ago

You could also use Gmelius to use icons and text plus lots of other options like removing ads. I'm enjoying so far.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dheionainndbbpoacp...

chintan• 14 years ago

This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors

They completely REVERSED it!!

Previously:

Blue - No new message

Orange - New chat message

Now:

Blue - New chat message

Black - No new message

Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.

ntkachov• 14 years ago

On the topic of bad colors, I like facebook's old colors of "offline" and "online": A green circle for online. a Gray-green circle for offline. On a screen with bad gamma, they looked almost exactly the same.

mthreat3• 14 years ago

I totally agree with you. Another specific change that is hard to defend is the new "..." three dots to expand hidden parts of the conversation from previous messages. It used to be text that was clear and large enough to click on. Apparently the Gmail team hasn't learned about Fitts' Law, and the new target is pretty hard to hit with a mouse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

binxbolling• 14 years ago

That trimming is extremely poor as well -- doesn't just clip parts of the conversation from previous messages, but parts of my current message! It drives me up the wall. I have had it trim my entire e-mail, then have to awkwardly explain to the recipient that they should click those three dots to see what I'd written. It's insanity, and when I called Google tech support about it... oh wait, LOLsupport.

Zarel• 14 years ago

Fitt's law is useful for two insights: The obvious one is that things you want to be easy to click should be large/close, but the less obvious one is that things you don't want to be easy to click should be small/far.

The "..." dots is probably an example of the latter - I'd guess that Google wants people to view entire conversations by expanding the conversation view, not by clicking "...", so they make one way much easier than the other.

twoodfin• 14 years ago

I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.

tikhonj• 14 years ago

I've also found the "important" filtering very useful. It's fairly rare now that I get an email that really matters and is not marked "important". I think that it takes a while for it to figure out my patterns (yay for machine learning), but after that it works great. I bet most people just weren't patient enough to train it properly. (Of course some may just have more complicated ideas of what an important message is than me.)

kluge• 14 years ago

The best part of it is having Gmail on Android notify you only about important messages. It's great to get notifications about emails from friends about things going on tonight, but not get bothered by email list messages that can wait.

ilamont• 14 years ago

Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz").

(I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)

freditup2• 14 years ago

Eh, I think Yahoo Mail was upgraded a year or so ago. I prefer it to GMail.

muyuu2• 14 years ago

Has effing tabs so you can have a "compose" tab open and reach your email for info to copy-paste in your message.

Something as basic as this is missing in gmail's default interface. Having to save and go back to drafts is cumbersome, as are other work-arounds.

thezilch5• 14 years ago

Pop the compose into a new window and/or tab? The assumption is probably that tabs and windows are built into your browser, why build another layer of tabs?

jdietrich• 14 years ago

It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width.

Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster.

Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be very reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.

mortenjorck• 14 years ago

You're probably thinking of Doug Bowman's classic "Goodbye Google" post: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

I think two things are entirely possible here: One, that in reaction to Bowman's high-profile indictment of Google's design culture, there has been a shift over the past few years toward Apple-like, auteur-driven design at Google, that was misapplied in this case, or (I think more likely), every detail of the new Gmail UI was extensively tested by itself, but there was no final arbiter to say "you know what? This one part sucks; let's change it despite the data."

furyofantares• 14 years ago

So you think the possibilities are that either google ignored the data or the data is wrong with no affordance to the possibility that you are wrong?

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Everyone complains when Apple changes anything too. Google nailed that part.

baddox• 14 years ago

I thought the general consensus was that all the Google usability testing actively resulted in bad designs.

ekianjo5• 14 years ago

I have heard the same thing about Google before, but obviously there seems to be a change. The old Google would not "push" a new interface when there is so much resistance to the new design. I may be suffering from a sample bias, but no Gmail user around me likes the new design. If they did test this stuff, maybe they cherry-picked their target population to get the results they wanted to please the designers. Who knows.

commandar• 14 years ago

Sample size of one, but I love the new Gmail UI, personally.

reneherse2• 14 years ago

To give a counter example to your first point regarding the "old Google": A year or two ago they did a major redesign of the Google News page. There was a huge amount of negative and often thoughtful feedback in the user discussion forums, but it was all seemingly ignored, and the new interface was implemented ostensibly without change.

The page has since changed again, I believe, and it's even more of a mess. Scanning the page while scrolling is nearly impossible unless you've very carefully placed your mouse pointer over elements that do not expand on hover. (It's really maddening and I barely use the page anymore because of it.)

pcwalton• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that the fact that something has been thoroughly A/B tested makes it indefensible. It is possible that overuse of A/B testing results in a local maximum, with sweeping changes needed to reach the global maximum.

adrianhoward4• 14 years ago

It is possible that overuse of A/B testing results in a local maximum, with sweeping changes needed to reach the global maximum.

That's not overuse - that's just bad use :-) There is nothing to stop people split testing radical redesigns.

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

On the other hand, the tendency for users to become attached to existing ways of working also leads to getting stuck in local maximums.

ajross3• 14 years ago

Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing (nor, frankly, an unjustified one). What surprises me is that we haven't figured this out yet and rehash the same flame war every time.

The desktop environments show this best: c.f. Gnome 3. Also Gnome 2. And Gnome 1 for that matter (vs. KDE2). And KDE4. And KDE3. And Windows Vista. And OS X Lion.

mattmanser• 14 years ago

You're begging the question.

If we take what you say is true every redesign is good, which is patently false.

A perfect example is the Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster. Also putting Vista in your list there, mmmmmm. Wasn't exactly a great redesign was it.

The Google redesign is also pretty much a disaster.

forgotusername2• 14 years ago

> People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing

I've had some thoughts on this recently, and wholeheartedly disagree. We spend aeons engineering stability into every other interface within a software ecosystem, since it's supposed to improve stability, reduce surprising breakage, improve engineer efficiency, discoverability, etc., but when it comes to interfaces in the user plane, it's like the only established methodology is FUCK YOU Driven Development.

In these systems, and Gmail, the user is not considered an intelligent, complex actor in the system, but instead something more like a child sitting in a cinema whose only criteria for synchrony is to be repeatedly dazzled by confounding changes to the way it interacts with the system.

This is fundamentally wrong in so many ways. Not least, the user is the main purpose for the existence of these systems (er, right??), and yet the user's interface to the system is the one most likely to functionally break without warning.

You cannot address the reliability of the entire system without considering the last mile - dropping a change the size of the Gmail redesign on millions of users without a multitude of small iterations, or with a huge amount of fanfare and warning, is an unmitigated disaster for the reliability and efficiency of the overall system.

I don't give 2 fucks how much of the scientific method was abused to create the new system up to that point, if it doesn't comfortably fit the millions of delicate tendrils that have grown between my mind and it, then from the user's perspective the change is much closer to an abject failure.

I suspect in years to come this will be an increasingly important area for study, and I pray the outcome to some extent will simply be that corporations will need to give up achieving quick feel-good wins by arbitrarily fucking with the user-machine interface, although I could be wrong. We could always be further reduced to that mindless entertainment-only child in the cinema, responsible only for the most basic direction of the outcomes of our interaction with the overall system, the tacit attitude of the large corporations as they drop huge changes like this without warning.

The outcry we hear over these changes isn't just bored people being picky, it's the sound of a trillion dying neurons in a million interconnected biological systems. Much as a fully grown cat wouldn't fare well being stuffed into a jar, the users here suffer just the same. Thin the cat's diet slowly over time, widen a border here, replace some text with an icon there, and the small bits of death and shrinkage that occur over time will mean that cat will soon be ready to contentedly purr its way into that jar and fall into a dreamy slumber all of its own accord.

kamjam• 14 years ago

I actually find the redesign quite nice. I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it when I first switched to it, I "temporarily reverted back" which helped me "map" the old functionality to the new. Stuff the blogger is ranting about are all easily "fixed" back to the old look and style, but he hasn't gone to the trouble of looking. In fact, the 2nd comment on site tells you how. The demarkation thing, I haven't used the default theme ever since additional ones were available, I see his point but just adding a background solves that. There is also new functionality for display density, i used the one which reverted to the old look.

But at least they have provided the functionality to go back to an old style look (albeit i had to dig around a bit and the average user may struggle, GMail settings are not the most user friendly IMO). I very rarely use it, but I still struggle with the ribbon style menu in MS Office, and that's been around for years!

Duff2• 14 years ago

The flames die down when people realize that there are design improvements that help them down the road.

OS X Finder UI is a mess anyway, so changes that make it easier for non-technical folk are probably net positives.

I don't have a good public example in mind, but the users at my employer often flip with volcanic rage when applications are changed -- even godawful VB5 legacy apps. Usually you can discern the "I hate change, and am typing up a memo of complaint" arguments versus "you made things worse" arguments based on who is complaining.

With respect to GMail, when people like pg who get the big picture are saying that the UI sucks, it probably sucks.

abraham• 14 years ago

> Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it.

That isn't a usability disaster. That is a habit/memory disaster.

DavidAbrams7• 14 years ago

OK. I'll call them inept and pan their design based on months of USE. As far as I'm concerned, there's only one example needed to prove the failure of this new design:

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...

anthonyb10• 14 years ago

Go to Settings > Labels, then pick the ones that you want to show. Pity your "months of USE" didn't take you that far...

thezilch5• 14 years ago

Click the square/arrow to the right of any label, there are a plethora of options, including when and why a label should be shown at all costs. Frankly, the label functionality that exists now, in the redesign, is amazing.

option_greek4• 14 years ago

Ya, one of the worst changes of the new design. You have to hover over edge of the last folder to see all of them. They could have used simple accordian instead of all this mess. The new Gmail causes me nausea when ever I use it.

ragmondo• 14 years ago

This is my major gripe as well ...

nchlswu4• 14 years ago

When Brin took the lead, the design culture inside Google changed.

My facts may be slightly off, but Brin essentially gave a lot more freedom to designers. As part of the Google redesign (or +ifying), Brin gave all the design responsibilities to the same division that's been producing some Google's commercials. This is undoubtedly a division that appreciates design more, but arguably doesn't appreciate the data as much.

After this, we all saw the obvious redesigns across Google's products. With such a drastic redesign, I am doubtful they did any large scale a/b testing that they typically do (for individual features or otherwise).

Its pretty evident something changed, and I personally have no doubt it's due to changes in the way Google goes about design. They've swung from one end of the spectrum (data obsessed) to another side that's too focused on 'artsy' design.

pork• 14 years ago

Um...Page took the lead, not Brin.

tallanvor• 14 years ago

You should never be reluctant to question things.

From my experience, the new design is horrible for usability. The lack of definition between the menus and the content makes it much more difficult for me to pay attention to the emails. --I've had to switch to a theme, which helps a bit, but in my opinion it's still much harder to use than the older design.

el_presidente• 14 years ago

There is absolutely no way they tested their design on anything smaller than a 15" laptop. I don't need to see their test data to figure that out; loading Reader or Gmail on my 10" netbook is good enough.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Agreed, the content pane gets reduced immensely on my 12" screen. Thank FSM for Stylish and Google Reader Absolutely Compact ;)

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Try the mobile layout,and ask them to change their amuser agent detection.

ashleyw2• 14 years ago

You can go too far with A/B tests, and maybe the Google execs realised that. You just end up with a fragment of your user base who like everything and convert well, and likely a majority who don't (to varying degrees, of course.)

To make a 'good' product, you've got to make some tough design and feature choices on your users' behalf. Case in point: Microsoft vs. Apple. Microsoft are well known to test extensively with "real" users, and Apple, well…don't!

Drbble9• 14 years ago

What is a conversion in Gmail?

zerostar07• 14 years ago

I for one still get confused with their icons. I mean, Archive doesn't look at all like archive, Spam looks like a quota warning error, "move to" looks more like "view another folder", and the lack of borders makes my eyes wander outside of the text all the time. And I have to agree about the uselessness of the importance icon. All my mail is marked as important, yes, i know that, how does this help me? It's more useful to know whether you 've replied/acted on an email instead (that could be a nice feature). Not saying the redesign is absolutely bad, after all it's not a radical departure from the previous one, just some things need fixing.

jim-greer• 14 years ago

I really like the importance system. My inbox is in 3 sections: Important, Starred, and Everything Else. I look a Everything Else once per day and can typically blow it all away without reading in a couple of clicks.

edit: As for knowing what you've acted on, I always archive an email when replying. There's a Labs feature called 'Send & Archive', which makes this easy.

Duff2• 14 years ago

I'd argue that something has radically changed within Google.

Personally, I don't mind the new interface that much -- once it's in compact view and you change to a darker theme. They did make some significant improvements for folks who live in multiple Google Accounts, and I think the Google+ integration is pretty slick.

But, there is no way that incessant testing produced metrics leading to the default white-on-white theme and non-compact view configuration. Maybe they surveyed people with poorly chosen questions or did something else that caused the testing to fail. But they didn't do a meaningful usability test that involved using a mail app.

GMail originally moved email UI forward with the conversation view -- I think they saw this new look as a similar thing, and pushed it out.

aresant• 14 years ago

I overwhelmingly agree as a UX guy w/the comments in this thread about the poor choices from a design perspective.

But since this new design rolled into beta I've found myself slowly depending on Gmail more and more vs. my desktop client.

I don't know why but the "lack" of proper interface design here makes it feel blazing FAST to me, which is really the #1 thing I care about when trying to keep up with a slew of email.

I never had that sense in the previous version.

Anybody else?

DavidAbrams7• 14 years ago

Nope. The asinine hiding of most of your mail folders makes it way slower to navigate. And there's no indication that they exist. No control with which to reveal them.

This regression in UI standards that evolved and stayed in place for decades reveals that there aren't enough decent designers to do the required work today. And they don't have even a moderate level of experience or common sense, or they wouldn't make such glaring errors.

nchlswu4• 14 years ago

I hobble through that feature so often. You'd think a team that dogfoods this stuff would want to fix it.

That being said, I know the feeling the parent is talking about, but I never got that feeling with Gmail. It was something that worked and that's what I appreciated about it.

anthonyb10• 14 years ago

Click on the little arrow next to your folder/label. Under the 'In label list:' part, select 'Show'. Now your folders appear all the time. Also, you can click the "More" at the bottom to expand it.

Why is that so hard?

EDIT: No really - why is it so hard? Better than 90% of the complaining on this page could be solved just by spending a few minutes going through settings, tweaking GMail to your liking. There's even a settings page where you can see all of your labels in one place, and set each folder to show/hide/show if unread. It's specifically designed for the parent's use case, and yet he pretends that it doesn't exist.

BrandonM• 14 years ago

GMail is so much faster all the way around if you use keyboard shortcuts. Because I'm rarely using the mouse and the keyboard shortcuts don't change, the experience feels largely the same to me.

In the case of labels especially, gl followed by a few characters from the label, then Enter gets me to the label page before I would even have time to figure out where my mouse cursor is.

DLarsen• 14 years ago

I have no problem with the new Gmail. After the initial adjustment period, I find myself enjoying it more than the old version. I have developed a reflex for using the buttons that didn't exist with the text versions. It just happened.

wololo• 14 years ago

brilliant hack to re-enable reverting to the old gmail UI:

http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerj...

ranit8• 14 years ago

It works! I love you.

wmeredith• 14 years ago

Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.

ekianjo5• 14 years ago

Don't shoot the messenger - Who cares if his site is not easy to read? It's all about the message. He does not pretend to be a UI designer or something.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

Because maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Personally having used the old Gmail interface and the new Gmail interface extensively, I think the criticisms do mostly boil down to change aversion.

Just to take one point: the icons are confusing at first, but mail is something you daily for years, and Gmail has always been optimized for power users, so even though it might take you a week or two to get used to the icons, it's a benefit because now a greater percentage of the words on the screen are actually your email content.

luser0012• 14 years ago

What did you find hard to read about the site? I was able to read it just fine. (just double-checked).

Nice big text with high, but not too high, contrast. What's not to like?

pedrogrande2• 14 years ago

I'm sorry but the text is tiny! It looks no bigger than 8px. Are you reading it on a mobile device perhaps?

wavesplash• 14 years ago

I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes.

In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme:

http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic...

Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing:

http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...

andrewfelix3• 14 years ago

I have no issue with the new design. But I think this is a fair criticism considering how polarising the change has been.

e_proxus• 14 years ago

This user style puts the text back on the buttons: http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons...

suboptical• 14 years ago

There's an option in general settings to add text button labels.

d5tryr2• 14 years ago

All or nothing? They gave users an entire year to transition!

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

I've long solved the Gmail web interface issues by accessing it only via IMAP. On the rare occasions when I have to use the website or Android Gmail clients they seem so unproductive to me. I think it is an information density thing - my desktop client (Thunderbird these days) is able to do a far better job of showing me more information at once. It also has the ability to manage state a lot better than web apps so my different panes can have differing contexts.

mellis• 14 years ago

Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. This is one way I know that I'm a mediocre designer. Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well.

I feel like Google has suffered from a similar problem - the solution to every UI problem these days is minimalism. Remove borders, accents, highlights, colors. On the surface it looks clean and simple but scratch beneath that and it seems to have no soul and no reason to exist.

I think the same issue goes directly to functional aspects as well - the functions and features on the page should feel alive as if they are speaking to me. I should be attracted to them, immersed in them, like they've been incorporated as parts of myself - but I'm not - I can barely differentiate them from the inactive, static parts of the page. Most of Google these days feels like I am filling out an IRS tax form. At best it is boring, at worst it is aggravating.

I'm looking forward to when we get through this new style of design from Google.

theoj• 14 years ago

>> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user.

Interesting observation... this is something I struggled with as well coming from a coding background and trying to do design -- at the individual element level the colors seemed great, but pulling back to the larger picture everything looked washed out. Did you ever come up with a solution for this?

ThomPete• 14 years ago

The solution is to find one or two contrast colors that you use sparingly. you would be surprised how much an icon or some text or a couple of elements in a contrasting color will make your design pop into life.

Think about it (loosly) the way you think about inheritance in OOP. What is the parent, what are the ancestors.

All elements on pages have a priority. That priority should be the guide of your visual heiarchy. This can be done with size alone but it can also be done with color.

Also black or almost black (#222-#333) as copy is always a good way to make sure your page has contrast. But again it depends on what you are doing.

I really need to finish my book on design for developers. I think I have found a way to create the bridge between being a developer and a designer. When I get to new york I will have more time.

nullflux• 14 years ago

The solution is to learn color and how it works. Start with something like color theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well.

I'd say that depends on the subject. I don't want bold decisions to try and energize my experience with my text editor.

option_greek4• 14 years ago

In other words, the new design looks like its designed by machines in the matrix film. Everything uniform and soul less.

Drbble9• 14 years ago

Aka getting the chrome out of the way and letting the content take focus.

eblume• 14 years ago

Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.

jcastro• 14 years ago

I feel completely opposite, if anything I think gmail should go back to being simpler and more minimalist instead of more complicated.

jrockway• 14 years ago

I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.

initself• 14 years ago

I use it without problems too, and so does the author, but our eyes are not happy and our brains are less relaxed. We never used importance and we don't want it cluttering up our stars. We need visual queues, like lines.

nollidge3• 14 years ago

You can turn it off. Under Inbox in Settings.

DavidAbrams7• 14 years ago

Well, I thought the old design sucked, so I welcomed change.

Guess what? The new design sucks far more.

nchlswu4• 14 years ago

the fundamental problem I have with the redesign is the fact that it introduced usability problems that weren't there before. I'll admit the redesign may have solved other ones, I admittedly didn't notice them at the time.

The three points the author pointed out are some glaring usability issues that can be a problem for a big chunk of people. Just because you or I can use it without a hitch doesn't mean its a great design.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

It's certainly possible that this is the reason, but I agree with the author that it's arrogance to assume that disliking a change can always be attributed to change aversion.

msluyter• 14 years ago

I hate the new themes. My question is: why couldn't they have provided themes that at least look similar to the old ones? I tried most of the available themes and there only one that I find vaguely satisfactory is the high contrast theme. Some of them, like "Wood" are laughable -- is this an old Myspace page I'm seeing? And better yet, you'd think a company with Google's talent pool could make the themes configurable at a more granular level.

Thanks, Google, for making me contemplate abandoning gmail for the first time. (I know, I know... it's free, right? So what right do I have to complain? I guess I'm mostly angry at myself for growing so dependent on it (and recommending it to my friends/family.))

drucken• 14 years ago

I, like the author, abhor the new GMail interface. Thankfully, I found a workaround, explained at bottom.

In fact, I found it difficult to explain to my parents how to navigate the new interface. They were quite upset at the changes and were considering about how to revert to their old providers (thankfully, I set up an email forwarding domain for them years ago so they can change any time they wish). It really is that appalling!

The contrast in usability to almost any other web mail service is shocking. Check Hotmail or Fastmail.fm or even Yahoo mail and "feel" the difference yourself!

Workaround to GMail's new interface:

0. Make sure you have a browser or plugin that supports site-selective scripting, e.g. NoScript.

1. Disable scripting for google.com

Then when you login, GMail offers a "basic html" interface. This is amazingly straightforward, fast, everything clearly delineated with strong colors, all new information extremely obvious, and just the basic design that matches closely to the old design.

If Google manage to mess up even this basic interface, then I guess, I and my family will have to find alternatives, e.g. switching to mail clients or for those who travel a lot to Hotmail.

jsherry• 14 years ago

"I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily."

You can remove the importance markers: Settings > Inbox tab > Importance Markers.

iaskwhy• 14 years ago

And there is also a setting for having text labels in buttons instead of icons.

robomartin• 14 years ago

I have been using Yahoo Mail for a number of years. I find the interface to be far superior to that of GMail. More usable and practical. In many ways it mimics Outlook. They have some nice drag-and-drop action, right click menu tools and, my favorite, an Outlook-like reading pane. Last time I touched GMail it felt clunky. Because of this I have never felt compelled to use it.

gorloth• 14 years ago

The thing that drives me crazy with the new design is the separate scrolling areas, when I use the mouse wheel or hit the up/down arrow keys I want the entire thing to scroll, not whatever chunk I happen to my mouse in. This is especially annoying as I have a low res screen (old computers) and thus I can't much of any of the chat list, I used to just be able to scroll down to see it. I wish knew CSS magics to try and fix it with stylish or something (I'm a c programmer all the way)

anthonyb10• 14 years ago

All of the things that he's complaining about are changeable in settings. And not even buried three levels deep -- they're right on the first settings page!

1. Pick a different theme. I have one with a blue background, not the default light/white one.

2. Go into the general settings, and change your star to a different colour, ie. enable the red, or blue one, or the green checkbox. Now they stand out.

3. Go into the general settings. Change the 'Button Labels' radio from 'Icons' to 'Text'.

If you're going to bag someone's interface, you should at least spend some time figuring out how you can change it...

mthreat3• 14 years ago

Thanks, changing the labels to text is a big help. I didn't even notice it there in General settings. It still doesn't change the tiny "..." link to a text label (the thing you click on in a message to show previous messages in the conversation). See my other comment here about Fitts' Law.

thezilch5• 14 years ago

While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?

paul2• 14 years ago

Well at least there's a giant red COMPOSE button, because every time I see a giant red button, I think COMPOSE!

I'm hoping that they'll do another revision soon to make it look more like the recently updated G+ design, which actually puts some visual separation between content and navigation (and also doesn't have giant red buttons).

anthonyb10• 14 years ago

There isn't on my GMail, because I figured out how to change the theme...

paul2• 14 years ago

As did I, but the defaults shouldn't be awful.

pedrogrande2• 14 years ago

Personally, I love the new GMail interface and have been using it for months. I like that is less cluttered and that I can more easily configure what is displayed. I've changed the buttons to be text in the settings as I did find the icons hard to pick at a glance. I also love the new themes.

It's interesting to me to see so many people grumble at interface changes whether it's Facebook or Gmail.

BlackNapoleon• 14 years ago

Same...

bane• 14 years ago

As much as a I dislike the new Gmail design, I'm fine with it, why? I almost never use the Gmail site. I'm either getting my mail with Thunderbird or my tablet or phone. I almost never have a reason to do otherwise.

nkurz• 14 years ago

I'm in the same boat, and think the usability of the new interface is terrible. And the pretentiousness of the "form over function" design still makes me gag. But Chrome plugins like "Minimalist for Everything" make it almost bearable.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde...

This and similar tools let hide and modify GMail with custom CSS and Javascript. Instead of trying to convince Google to behave rationally, it's easier to try to warp the new interface into something usable. I think about half the things in the article are already covered.

If only I could figure out a way to get the "stars" on the same side in the message view as on the overview...

njharman• 14 years ago

Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste.

To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.

pirateking2• 14 years ago

Great analogy between a designer's idea of "taste", and the engineers equivalent "elegance".

To take it further, just as the shortest code isn't always the best, the most minimal design is also not best by default.

andymangold• 14 years ago

Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who don't understand design abusing style and visual trends.

The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.

twelvechairs• 14 years ago

One of the main problems why the 'clean design' has not actually benefitted users is because of gmails feature creep. Where once I could just write and recieve mail, now, by default, I have 'stars', 'circles', 'importance markers', '+ share', 'notifications', 'gadgets'... etc. all confusing my view of my mail. Most users don't want any of these things, and they certainly don't want to have to spend mental energy realising they dont want them, then hunting around in settings menus to see if you can actually turn them off...

There are some good design additions in the revised gmail too, but IMHO the above is really what makes gmail feel much more cluttered and cumbersome than it was before....

halayli• 14 years ago

Forcing users to relearn an interface without providing any added value makes no sense.

I ended up moving to Mail.app (which isn't perfect) because of the hideous in-page scrolling forced on me in the new Gmail interface.

Desktop experience is unbeatable; snappier interface, better performance, wider access to system resources, better integration with the OS, and you don't have to rely on the browser to be open all the time. I find this advantageous especially when composing emails.

KaeseEs• 14 years ago

I'm incredulous that one of the goals of the redesign was to make more powerful themes. New-style themes are much, much less powerful than the old-style themes - cf. the new Terminal theme, which can't even change the text color or font, but is rather a hollow shell of itself with a small gif of a blinking green cursor in the upper left corner the only remnant of its old self. A preview of the old page in my Opera speed dial is all that remains of my old green-on-black monospace friend; I have set it to never update.

Incidentally, the new UI for video calls makes the 'end' button the same color as the background, and it is very difficult to see.

theootz• 14 years ago

Pretty horrible list IMO...

1) Try a different theme, it may help if it really affects you that much. But this is the only one I somewhat agree with as being possibly an issue; but nothing I really thought of when first looking at the new UI

2) The marker is more than far enough away to make it easy to scan through IMO. This feels far too subjective to just throw out and be like "yea this is definitely a bad change" without doing some testing first. Either way, you can disable this from settings. (Disable snippets iirc?)

3) This too can be disabled: go to settings and change it to text labels instead of graphical labels?

As much as I used to hate the new look too, I think it's improved enough since its first iteration to get out of the way and let me do my thing. Though, I still REALLY hate the fact that you can't click on the "Google" logo at the top left to go back to the main page for whatever application you happen to be at. I have no idea why they would remove that...

drostie• 14 years ago

    > I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers
    > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the
    > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody
    > could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it
    > because it was unfamiliar.

It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar belongs to this tab. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing.

I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is not the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those cannot be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.

lani• 14 years ago

thank gawd - someone needed to say that . we're all helpless with google's arm-twisting us to accept the new email-look, or going back, forcing youtube users to start using a gmail id ..

adrianhoward4• 14 years ago

Now, personally speaking, I don't like a bunch of the changes (those damn icons being the most annoying - and yes I know you can change them to text and I have :-). I can certainly criticise some stuff that gets in the way of my personal workflow. But hey - I'm not the 'average' GMail user. Expecting Google for optimise for me is daft.

A couple of random thoughts from usability tests I've done over the years:

* People are treating the changes to gmail in isolation. Google has changed and integrated design over all of their products. Some parts of a system can get "worse", but still help the overall system get "better". I've seen this when we culled some specialised hi-density layouts on a particular part of a larger system that pissed off some expert users who spent all their time there - but opened up the functionality to be used by a much larger population who were more familiar with the "normal" look.

* People don't know what Google is optimising for. Usability and usability testing isn't necessarily about "making things nice for the user". It's about meeting the business goal. For example I've seen users hate the fact we took some layout and colour preferences away from them, despite the fact that overall satisfaction went up, and efficiency increased even for the users who hated the change.

* I 100% guarantee that the people commenting here are not "normal" as far as Google is concerned. Does it matter if the geeks like me hate that they can see less e-mail at a time, if the other 99% of the market is jumping for joy that they're not repeatedly clicking on the wrong e-mail? Sometimes you just can't make everybody happy - so have to make a decision over which audience you want to be happy. You will generally have a more successful product if 60% of your audience goes "yay" rather than 100% going "meh".

* I spend a bunch of my time talking to "normal" users. I've noticed the general reaction to the new GMail be very different from the general reaction here. They either liked it, or just not noticed/expressed an opinion. I suspect Google cares about that user group more than it does me :-)

Also, and this is complete guesswork on my part, this feels like a first stage to me. Currently the various apps are very lightly integrated with a mostly pure visual design makeover. I wouldn't be surprised to see more functional integration appear over the next year or two as more people perceive the various Google apps and systems as an integral "thing".

rubynerd2• 14 years ago

What I don't like is colour as a premium feature, you pay with your social profile

barcoder• 14 years ago

What I hate most is that when typing an email it is contained in a fixed size box. I can't fill my screen with my email, I have to scroll inside the box to move up and down.

bceagle• 14 years ago

I just don't get this article from the sense that I have used GMail as my primary email client for the past 5 years and I their redesign didn't affect me at all. The things this author talks about seem to be more of personal preferences than actual objective thought. There has only been one thing that has ever really bugged me about GMail and it has nothing to do with the visual design. I don't like how they treat Folders and Tags as sort of the same thing. In my mind, they are two separate things. I want to organize my mail into folders, but I also want to tag them with keywords that have cross-cutting concerns (ex. folders Work or Home, but tags like Expenses that could be on emails in both folders).

Now, I understand that what I am talking about is sort of a personal preferences as well, but I guess my point is that I would care more about changes to functionality in GMail than small, minor visual changes like the ones this author describes. I sort of agree with their mentality that people eventually figure out the new UI and then it is no longer an issue.

spinchange• 14 years ago

My wife and I think they are optimizing for women. No empirical basis for this, it just seems like every one is aping UI elements and styles from Pinterest these days.

mrweasel• 14 years ago

The part I find interesting is that whole "minimalism" part. Simply removing stuff or add icons in favor of text buttons have nothing to do with minimalism necessarily.

I don't claim to be a minimalism expert, but more often than not people who talk about minimalism seems to think it's either cleaning up your house or removing stuff that "People don't really need", without figuring about what the basic needs actually are. Removing all door handles from your house doesn't make it a minimalist home.

andypants• 14 years ago

The new icons remind me of visual studio's new redesign.

Monochrome icons, no text. Ugh, horrible to use.

jetz• 14 years ago

Actually they don't have much choices on dropping some specific email features to make UI better. Anyways I think it's just like MS Metro. One cannot say OMG this is cool as we say with Apple properties but people continue to use those (inferior) UIs.

nollidge3• 14 years ago

Please, for the love of Loki, can we all stop equating our subjective opinions with objective truth? Your tastes are different than others. That doesn't make them "arrogant" - at least, not necessarily.

saturdaysaint• 14 years ago

Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble.

I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).

ditojim• 14 years ago

change is good in general. this change to gmail's interface is good in general. all 3 points in the article can be adjusted by changing a user setting.

emehrkay• 14 years ago

So no mention of the font size of this blog's content? The comments are larger than the content

d5tryr2• 14 years ago

I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone:

Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan.

On your first point though you are simply wrong. The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter.

The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface.

The same is true for coloured backgrounds. If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity. This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode. Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do.

I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.

billmcneale• 14 years ago

It's spelled "Gmail", lowercase 'm'. Source: the Gmail blog, http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/

GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

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