Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

http://storyblog.io/f11ffb15/anxiety-over-the-new-gmail-compose

by onelovelyname • 13 years ago

255 241 13 years ago

storyblog.io

bnejad• 13 years ago

Really, anxiety? Use a native/local mail client and I'm sure it will solve your problems.

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Yeah I'm kinda OCD about my email.

Thanks, just found the HN thread about email clients. Checking out Airmail now.

scott_s• 13 years ago

Perhaps the anxiety is because there was a change, and not specifically this change?

ProAm• 13 years ago

I started using eM Client as a native desktop email app because of the new gMail reply feature. Feature-wise it does everything I expect/want for email.

It drives me absolutely insane when a company makes an 'enhancement' and reduces usable window space. If I am writing a long email I want to be able to use the maximum amount of window space and not be crammed into something that is 25% of my monitor size.

RDeckard2• 13 years ago

Link to the HN thread with email clients?

jinushaun2• 13 years ago

The problem with that suggestion is that the old Gmail used to have the best UX out of all email clients—web or desktop. I preferred it over Outlook or Thunderbird. Now I'm begrudgingly using it unti something better comes along and hoping Google doesn't acqui-hire them out of existence.

uptown• 13 years ago

Why not just hold shift when you click "compose"?

Sulfolobus• 13 years ago

Using shift-click to open in a new window is a fairly standard behaviour in most browsers these days isn't it? Then again I guess it wasn't intuitive in this case.

Edit: I should note that the above is actually a genuine question.

cheapsteak2• 13 years ago

Shift-click to open in a new window is a pattern for links. Gmail's 'Compose' doesn't look like a link, it looks like a button.

Shift-clicking the 'search' button doesn't work on Google.com.

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Yep, just found this out from another comment. Thanks!

thrownaway24242• 13 years ago

Also just shift-c if you have the keyboard shortcuts enabled.

mrtimo• 13 years ago

this is close to the old functionality, but not the exact same.

res0nat0r• 13 years ago

Click the "-><-" arrows at the top and you can go back to the old style.

I like the new version and wish they'd used it long ago, I want a large box to type my emails in, not a small rectangle.

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Clicking "-><-" brings me to a small chat-like box for my email. Agreed though, I like large boxes for email.

molecule• 13 years ago

To avoid being distracted by the gmail inbox and to have a clean composition interface, I always keep this URL bookmarked, and it still works w/ the new compose:

https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailt...

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Oh, wow! This is pretty beautiful. Thank you.

pan69• 13 years ago

Or hold down Control when you click Compose.

tjohns• 13 years ago

Holding shift when you click compose is also a good one to know about. (Opens the compose dialog in a new, dedicated window.)

lingben5• 13 years ago

not to be snarky but you know, this is 2013, not 1999. If the largest and best funded company can't get something as simple as email right, then they should just pack up and go home. Or at least fire their whole UX/UI department and start fresh.

By right, I mean a clean, simple interface that you don't need to judiciously learn over dozens of hours of frustrating trial and error or by googling in support forums.

The old gmail UX was fine. In fact, compared to the new compose it was the bees knees. It takes humility to be able to realize that. But Jason wants to leave his mark - unfortunately the mark is an ugly smear.

cdash• 13 years ago

Thats funny, cause they got it right for me.

general_failure2• 13 years ago

Who is jason?

qu4z-23• 13 years ago

I just use the old basic html view. On the one hand, it's ugly as sin, but on the bright side, you can open any link in the UI in a new tab and it works as expected, which is like a breath of fresh air. So I can just middle click the compose button to get a new full-screen compose, or middle click threads from the inbox.

petercooper• 13 years ago

https://twitter.com/NewComposeSux collects together a lot of sentiment about how great this new feature is. I kinda feel sorry for Jason Cornwell. He's been blasted with "feedback" on Twitter since it went live.

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Thanks, checked it out. Impressed that Jason takes the time to respond to many of the tweets.

laureny• 13 years ago

My problem with that is people who write emails in full screen windows end up writing poorly formatted emails (very long paragraphs) because they are now composing their emails with 300 columns.

Besides, a CEO that can't focus on writing a message unless they don't have any other distraction on their screen should probably work on their focus skills.

mrb• 13 years ago

"should probably work on their focus skills"

Terrible argument. "Let's add more distractions to the screen, because the user should be able to focus anyway".

Also, Google broke the "Best Secret Gmail Feature" [1]. In the last few months, you can't select text and hit reply to quote it anymore. Grrr

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5963768/the-best-secret-gmail-feature-is-...

eli• 13 years ago

I believe there is a Labs option in settings to turn that on.

Monotoko• 13 years ago

Really? This still works for me, I use it a lot...

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Writing concise, properly formatted email is the responsibility of the writer, no matter the email client UI.

It's also my responsibility to ensure I can focus and work efficiently, agreed. Whether I can do that well with Gmail's new Compose is the issue.

leepowers• 13 years ago

"Besides, a programmer who can't focus on coding unless they have a quiet office with with no interruptions should probably work on their focus skills"

Everyone regardless of profession has a "zone" where they are the most productive. If a CEO needs to write 10 long-form emails in a day they should definitely have the best environment and the best tools for the job. It can be the difference between spending 5 minutes composing an email vs. 30 minutes.

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

Besides, a CEO that can't focus on writing a message unless they don't have any other distraction on their screen should probably work on their focus skills.

Also, they're holding it wrong. Right?

billnguyen• 13 years ago

I could live with the new Compose... its the hidden/floating "Formatting Options" that really grinds my gears.

jinushaun2• 13 years ago

A lot of people complain about the window size, but I agree. It's really the hidden options and extra clicks for me. Everything that used to be easy is now harder. And things that used to be hard are easier.

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

Gmail also seems to shorten the names of people you email to (at least for me). That makes me second-guess whether I'm really emailing the right person at times.

enochroot3• 13 years ago

Agreed. It also is not showing the email address making it easy to mistakenly send a personal email to someone's work account and vice versa.

acadien• 13 years ago

It always shows last names for me (so long as they're available). Unless you've got some new feature, I'm guessing those contacts just don't have full names assigned. Spending some time in the "contacts" tab, cleaning things up really made things easier for me in this respect.

enochroot3• 13 years ago

For my usage, the new compose has been a major step back. It now takes additional clicks to accomplish basic tasks (e.g. change the subject) and is less clear on what I am doing (e.g. when you cc someone and switch back to the body, the cc-ed names is now in To: line making it appear that you are sending it to them directly.) There are many other examples where the experience has become worse.

I am not clear if Google truly believes the new compose is an improvement or if there is a behind the scenes reason that is making up for the decrease in usability. The new product is so obviously a step back (to me) that I am assuming it's the latter. Has anyone seen a write up that has an explanation other than "improved practicality?"

rjbond3rd• 13 years ago

Oh man, I wish I knew. Have you noticed this one? You're editing a wrapped paragraph, you use the right-arrow key to move, and once you're at the end of -any- line, it suddenly jumps down to the "..." (the toggle for displaying the quoted message).

(Also, why hide the formatting bar...)

fluidcruft• 13 years ago

Ah, is that what's happening? All I know is I go back to proof my email before sending and I keep randomly ending up at the bottom and cursing as I scroll back.

colbyh• 13 years ago

I'm actually quite fond of the new compose window and I fall into essentially the same category of email user as you. My anxiety was in fact lessened a bit by the chat-like (and therefore more casual) vibe, thanks to large expanses of white space making me feel like I /must/ fill them with text.

Email anxiety is no fun, maybe a native client would be the best way to ensure your workflow is optimized?

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Makes sense. I do like it for casual mail - e.g., if I'm setting up a quick time to meet an advisor. But for more important things, it doesn't work well for me.

I am checking out Airmail thanks to an older HN thread. Cheers!

md224• 13 years ago

Umm... powered by Storystrings, but features the Svbtle network's Kudos button (as "cheers")... is there a connection here, or is the former borrowing from the latter?

rajivtiru4• 13 years ago

Using the github library here: https://github.com/masukomi/kudos

Also from the sourcecode on this blog:

dcurtis• 13 years ago

Interesting that someone took my code, nearly character-for-character, and "open sourced" it without permission.

ihnorton2• 13 years ago

Lately I've had a persistent feeling of annoyance with several Google products. Each annoyance is small enough to tolerate individually, but in aggregate it seems to me that Google has really lost something in the attention-to-detail department; this kind of persistent annoyance was the same thing that led me to Google from other services years ago.

Two examples:

- maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting.

- gmail: Previous/Next-message buttons flake out constantly (grayed out - clicking does nothing). New formatting options are hard to use and obnoxious.

And an old one that I ran in to again today:

- there is no (intuitive) way to copy a URL from google search results without all of the google redirect garbage. This fundamentally degrades the world-wide web. For example, I want to email a link to a pdf. If an in-browser pdf reader is not available, then the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link. I clicked the "share" button in hopes that this might give me the link; but no, it wanted me to share on G+.

rajivtiru4• 13 years ago

I just figured out that last point about google URLs today.

I wanted to copy/paste a link in a chat window but the google redirect url is so long it takes up the whole chat window and more! Instead of the domain.com/word I wanted.

cheapsteak2• 13 years ago

If you're using chrome, you might want to check out this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-google-redi...

sjbach• 13 years ago

Re: maps, you can revert to "classic" by clicking on the gear.

notok22• 13 years ago

I tried this, but it keeps forgeting the choice to use the classic maps and I always have to go to the options and pick it again. It's not such a big deal, but yeah, it's annoying.

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

For now.

nobodysfool• 13 years ago

adding to this:

- google voice: selecting 'all' only selects displayed items (calls, missed calls, voicemails, etc) so to delete items, you have to click 'all', then 'delete' then 'all' again. If you have 1000 items in your history, it takes 100 clicks to delete them all. Compare that to gmail - you can select every single message not just those displayed.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

I wrote a pair of shell scripts to deal with the URL encoding. I've also switched to DuckDuckGo for virtually all my search.

Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this.

http://pastebin.com/YvsAPm5u

eru• 13 years ago

Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this.

Try indenting by four spaces. Like this:

    Apologies as HN's quoting is line-wrapping and I can't seem to fix it. I'll pastebin this.

plorkyeran2• 13 years ago

Everything about the new Google Maps besides the maps themselves is so mindbogglingly bad that I have no idea how they thought it was ready for public consumption. It seems to be missing most of the features of the classic Google Maps, and those that are present are far harder to use. The UI for the public transit schedules is pretty much the only thing that seems like it could be an improvement once I get used to it (but for now it's mostly just really awkward).

xur172• 13 years ago

I've especially been missing the ability to make directions with multiple stops (I used to use that feature about 50% of the time). Also, the interface is a lot slower - it's tolerable on my 1 year old computer, but it's close to unusable on my 5 year old laptop.

gbog3• 13 years ago

The New Android map app is bad too. Rip the menu button, no way to get other routes suggestions anymore, I didn't find a quick way to switch from navigate view to route view.

All that is still the move toward less and less control for the user, initiated by Apple. I hope Google can revert soon, now that it is actually Apple which is coping with Google.

glomph• 13 years ago

I really hate the lack of ability to show street view and a map at the same time. How is that an improvement? It is now very hard to know where you are looking at.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

I can't even figure out how to get a permalink in Maps anymore. Nightmare.

gbog3• 13 years ago

- in Google plus, scroll down the steam, then decide you want to use j k to navigate, pof! you are back on top.

- in Google plus, you need to play maze to avoid the pop ups.

- contacts takes ages to load, when I usually use it only for a little tweak that should take 3 sec.

pg• 13 years ago

There's a reason for this pattern. When I complained to a friend at Google about the new GMail compose, he said that what was driving it was that Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters. The various Google products may have been inconsistent, but each of their designs was the product of long evolution.

Steve Jobs could probably have forced consistency on Google's products without breaking them, but few CEOs have the taste Steve had.

thezilch6• 13 years ago

What a load of crap. Plenty of untasteful and inconsistent crap had come out of Apple, under Jobs; it's painfully easy to find examples [0]. Everyone is going to have their opinions, of course, but the compose, unlabeled / iconography buttons, detractors of WYSIWYG emails, etc are _not_ disasters for myself and many others.

[0] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/06/on-ui-inconsistency-in-ios-5/

bane3• 13 years ago

I used to work for a software company that had a visualization product with several kinds of visualizations. One of the design philosophies was that all the visualizations had to have the same interaction model. Which of course made very little sense and artificially constrained the visualizations to the point that some of them were next to useless.

Customers liked the consistent interaction model for about the first 20 minutes, until they wanted to do something that was natural, but specific, for the visualization they were working with. When it turned out the product didn't and wouldn't ever support that thing they wanted to do, the entire house of cards came falling down.

Eventually we got rid of the person responsible for that decision and the product progressed rapidly and customer satisfaction (and sales) went up exponentially.

Consistent design is a very hard thing to get right, and very easy to get wrong. I think Apple under Jobs knew how to use consistency as a basic scaffolding for an application, but the actual details could still be quite app specific. The framework kept users oriented, but didn't dictate the functions of the software.

plinkplonk• 13 years ago

So why isn't any telling Larry that this idea isn't working that well? I thought Google was the kind of place the higher ups could tell the CEO that his idea wasn't so hot?

Fwiw, this search for 'beautiful consistent look across products' doesn't seem to be confined to Google. Yahoo Groups had a decent interface till they introduced a completely broken, unusable new look named "Neo". Just thinking about how unusable this made using Groups, makes me angry.

general_failure2• 13 years ago

This was a good comment but the Steve Jobs bit was unnecessary (because people like me will get distracted and flame you for it).

djt2• 13 years ago

It will be interesting to see how the new design of iOS 7 goes with this in mind.

cromwellian5• 13 years ago

The new Maps interface isn't driven by the idea of making it "consistent" with GMail, it's driven by the same idea that Google Search's homepage used to represent -- simplicity. The Map is the UI.

A single search box. You type in POIs, the Map is constructed around the search results.

The old Google Maps (the tile based one) was based on the idea of a multi-pane map with gadgets and a side panel of 10 ranked search results, but the map was the same no matter the search (pre-rendered tiles). Search results had to be clicked on the map to get a popup to see what it was. The new Maps is based on the idea that the Map itself is the search result The POIs are rendered directly into the map, just like a specialized paper map. It is based on spatial based exploration and relevancy.

There's a difference between a design disaster and "I don't like this because it is different than what I was used to and I don't want to change" IMHO, the new maps is what Maps should have been all along.

ChrisCinelli• 13 years ago

I am not sure how consistent they are... Beside the obvious learning curve to learn the new composer, I still find the old composer faster to use and more productive than the new one. Unless you know all the keyboard shortcut, now to use bullet points you need to click on the _A_, move the mouse on the bullet point icons and then clicking. Before one click was enough.

atacrawl• 13 years ago

Larry wanted a beautiful, consistent look throughout all Google's products. That sort of motivation leads to design disasters.

Of all the mantras from 37signals over the years, the one that I agree with and adhere to most is "context over consistency" for exactly this reason.

dncrane• 13 years ago

the link downloads immediately and there is no way to get the de-obfuscated link

If you go to your downloads list you can right click and do "copy link address" (at least on chrome and firefox)

lutusp• 13 years ago

Or use "wget" for the download, which lists all the intermediate address steps as it resolves them.

siddboots• 13 years ago

Youtube:

* Buffering was nerfed/broken some time ago. I can no longer watch 720p+ videos on youtube at all.

* Changing video quality now has a long and unavoidable delay, and often fails outright.

* Google are evidently uneasy about the profile name that I signed up with, and have been repeatedly nudging me to change it. I don't know how to reassure them about my choice.

* Advertising. Everywhere.

iopq• 13 years ago

There's ads on youtube? I wouldn't know, I'm using adblock

vmarsy• 13 years ago

A trick I use when I change quality is immediately clicking on the time bar, it enforce the change right away.

I agree with all the annoying points above!

colmvp4• 13 years ago

I can watch 720p+ videos but I have definitely noticed recently that loading is slower and sometimes more inconsistent.

The subscription feed is a mess. Before it was a grid and now it's in a list. The only reason why I know there are more videos uploaded than what's in my feed is because video authors title their videos in parts. So if I see "Part 3" I know that Part 2 and Part 1 are somewhere, just not in my feed.

cpeterso2• 13 years ago

YouTube keeps insisting I merge my legacy YouTube account with Google+. Then YouTube insisted I use two-factor authentication (to watch cat videos) and made me choose between giving them my phone number so they could send me a text message or giving them my phone number so they could robo-call me.

lzm• 13 years ago

Luckily you can fix the buffering behaviour with a browser extension. Look for "SmartVideo for Youtube".

aestra3• 13 years ago

I hate that Google "created" a youtube account for me, just because I use Gmail doesn't mean I want a youtube account (I don't). One day I forget to sign out of Gmail, I browse to Youtube, and bam, now I have a Youtube account, I'm signed in, and my video history is tracked, and I have to manually turn that off. I didn't ask for that.

cromwellian5• 13 years ago

The "new" Google Maps is essentially an opt-in beta. The "replacement" is to continue to use classic Maps until it is done. It is obvious that most of the old features like multi-stop directions will return, but Google needed external testers because WebGL is very dependent on machine performance and GPU, and they indicated as much when they limited the initial users to an explicit signup form.

I find the new Maps interface incredibly better than the old one. Search results appear directly on the map so you can see spatial relationships, easily highlighted and clickable. It invites exploration. No separate Google Earth plugin needed, seamlessly move from 2D to 3D, no separate Flash plugin for Street View. The way the map spotlights important roads and related places when you click on a particular POI helps with planning.

The only downside is it is slow, because it is a very complex web app, probably the most complex one ever written, but I'm sure they'll optimize it by the time it is ready for public consumption.

michaelt• 13 years ago

  It is obvious that most of the old features like 
  multi-stop directions will return

IMHO that is far from obvious.

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure they will optimize enough to make it as fast as the 'old' on an old machine. They won't put that much effort and just require machines supporting accelerated css/webgl and fast enough to run complex javascript such as this.

I hope they manage to keep the "old" maps accessible after switching to the new, since the responsiveness is so low it negates all the new features.

test001only• 13 years ago

Exactly, lot of UI features in GMail, Maps and Google plus are starting to piss of me. The UI used to be nice and comfortable to work with before, but now it is plain horrible. I read somewhere that Marissa Mayer used to control the UI of GMail and Maps(she apparently used to depend on metrics to get things right). Does this have to do something with she leaving?

Semaphor• 13 years ago

maps: I love the new interface. The only thing missing is re-adding rightclicks for additional options. For what I use maps nearly everything is easier than it was before. But as you want a replacement, what about OSM [1]? It's becoming better every day and a lot of areas have better data than google.

gmail: It became slower and more bloated all the time, the interface changes looked nice but were, as many said, horrible UX. I know the lack of tags is a dealbreaker for many but as I can live without them, fastmail.fm [2] is a replacement that does pretty much everything else better and faster.

search: Yeah, the lack of easy linking is extremely annoying and has been for quite some time now. My problem is still that I need the bubble to get relevant results for me. Every time I try to use DDG [3] or other replacements, searches result in way too much noise over signal. And with those boxes on the right side google now has what was one of the best features of DDG.

At least calendar is still useable for now as I haven't found a replacement I really liked.

[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [2]: http://fastmail.fm [3]: http://duckduckgo.com

znowi• 13 years ago

The new Google Maps on Android is disappointing. I can appreciate the clean, minimal interface, but with it are gone:

1. Zoom buttons. Now I have to hold the phone in one hand while pinch in and out with another, instead of a tap with one finger.

2. Offline maps. I suppose it's part of the "cloud strategy".

3. Secondary streets at common zoom level. Now I have to really zoom in to see them. A tad out and they're gone. Sometimes it shows them just fine, though. Perhaps, it's a bug.

coldpie• 13 years ago

It's not intuitive at all, but for zooming, you can double-tap-and-hold, then move your finger up and down to zoom in and out (or is it out and in?). That way you don't need two hands to zoom.

aestra3• 13 years ago

- maps: new interface is so terrible that I am actively looking for a replacement. It is painfully slow, search results are no longer displayed on the same page as the map (what?), and in general the minimalism has gone too far: the interface requires too much hunting.

I can't for the life of me figure out how to show street view on android's google maps. I know it used to exist, but did they really take it out?

dasil00310• 13 years ago

The self-righteous anger about the irredeemable horror of the new Gmail compose is starting to get a bit old.

First of all, it's not as one-sided as people are making it out. I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits. Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).

There are some important philosophical reasons behind some of these changes that I strongly agree with:

First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good. The OA seems to glorify long-winded CEO screeds, but by definition the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they're not I don't want to work with you), so it's correct to optimize for the short case. The two levels of pop-out (the second of which the OA appears to be completely ignorant of) scale up and out quite nicely.

Second, the hidden headers and formatting options are encouraging simplicity in email. Most email should not have formatting, and arguably most emails don't have CCs, BCCs, or edited subjects either. Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out. It takes a little while to get used to and then you just subconsciously do the double click, it's not really any harder than finding them in a sea of icons, it's just that previously you were used to that sea of options. The optimization for the common case is done correctly.

For me the new design (after turning on compact view) is a moderate improvement that did nothing to dilute the core value of Gmail which are the labels, keyboard shortcuts/navigation, conversation view and search/filters. Running it inside Mailplane makes it even better.

There are definitely annoyances, but nothing that's even close to driving me to something like mutt, and forget about GUI clients, all of them feel like molasses compared to Gmail.

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Browsing email while composing isn't part of my workflow. Definitely makes sense as a use case, a few others mentioned it as well.

Agreed, for short emails (setting up mtgs, quick reviews) it works fine for the most part.

Personal preference wise - I feel more comfortable sending email when I'm able to see CC/BCC, text formatting, & attachments. Understand that not everyone feels the same way.

olog-hai• 13 years ago

Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win

It was possible to do this before the changes rolled out. Shift-compose opened it (still does) in a new window, and you could work with it and your mailbox side-by-side.

dasil00310• 13 years ago

Not in reply it wasn't.

mavhc2• 13 years ago

Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload

If only someone had invented a windowing GUI.

My main issues, now I've set the default to fullish screen, is it's more like Outlook: editing the To/CC fields is annoying, and it wants you to always quote the entire email.

I await a Chrome extension to let me live in the past with people who knew how to use computers.

15charusername• 13 years ago

If only someone had invented a windowing GUI.

At work I have to use a mac, it's a PITA to manage multiple non fullscreen windows on it. There is also a fair amount of screen estate lost per window.

enochroot3• 13 years ago

I chuckled when I read:

First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good.

"Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short."

Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out.

Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this sentence.

dasil00310• 13 years ago

Nice pith, but how about adding some meat to that rebuttal.

"Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short."

The topic at hand is power emailing. Not people who write a message to their family once a week as the majority of their email.

Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this sentence.

I don't even know where you get this. Having a minimal interface with the most used features present and others grouped under menus of some sort is an age-old proven UI convention. This is the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of Microsoft software or other bloated programs with toolbars and ribbons bursting at the seams. Citing Microsoft is just a way for you to justify your emotional reaction to my comment without adding any substance.

Avshalom2• 13 years ago

Whoa whoa whoa. short by definition ? I use email to you know write to people if I want short I can text or chat or tweet or smoke signal. I rather assume email is long by definition.

dasil00310• 13 years ago

Okay I played fast and loose, but I meant this:

By definition of the length of a day, if you are sending any serious volume of emails then most of them are going to be short.

brownbat• 13 years ago

the small window by default encourages short emails... the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they're not I don't want to work with you)

Agreed, write enough emails and you eventually learn that you're on borrowed time beyond the first half sentence.

PS - Seven paras? Tsk... :)

lucian1900• 13 years ago

Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).

That's what window managers are for.

levosmetalo• 13 years ago

If email has to be short in your company, then why don't you just use twitter. Those 140 character limit should clearly help you and your employees to express better.

In the meantime, please leave alone people that use email to actually write something and go back to twitter and the likes.

benjamta• 13 years ago

I do quite like the new compose - I get a bit annoyed by the in line editor when you reply though. Feels a little inconsistent.

alexholehouse• 13 years ago

The "full screen mode" is like a parody of poor user interface and false promises.

That said, Outlook 365 is also bloody awful in terms of usability. Say I've sent an email to a list of people, there's no way (as far as I can tell, which is all that matters really) to then copy those email addresses. You have to literally click through each one and get the address individually.

gruseom2• 13 years ago

I agree with this post's use of the word "ruined". That's what the new Compose did. It's a usability train wreck which I'm astonished they put out at all, let alone impose it on users against their will. There are big things wrong with it and there are little things wrong with it and the sum total is frustrating and disconcerting. It's one thing to redesign a website, but email is a huge part of my daily work, and this feels as if renovators just drove a post up through the living room floor.

lingben5• 13 years ago

Jason Cornwell is a stupendous example of the Peter Principle.

gruseom2• 13 years ago

Let's not get personal. There are lots of ways this kind of thing can happen.

colmvp4• 13 years ago

Eh. I wouldn't call it a train wreck. I'm perfectly capable of accomplishing 100% of what I need to accomplish in Gmail, which is create, send, sort, search, and delete.

notatoad• 13 years ago

"My messages are important, god dammit."

no, they aren't. get over it. The new compose does a great job of framing your sent emails in the way your recipients are probably viewing them: quickly, and often from a small screen/window.

onelovelyname10• 13 years ago

Great point, thinking of it that way gives some insight into why Google may have changed the UI.

Demiurge3• 13 years ago

The insight being is that Google is now discarding the professional crowd who bought into their Apps for ADD teenagers. Time to look for alternatives.

Demiurge3• 13 years ago

You can't possibly be serious? :)

I can be replying to CC-style conversation and the way recipients are hidden now, I can easily make a mistake not removing key opponent when making comment to partners, a lot of money can be lost.

Email is extremely important for a lot of people.

aestra3• 13 years ago

Are you kidding me? I get emails from customers every single day, each one of those emails I read very carefully, from a large screen. Each one requires a response on my part, and if you were a customer you would expect the same.

I also do a real lot of personal emailing. I have family all over the country, and email is one way we keep in touch. I can spend over an hour composing an email to one of my family members, or one of my friends. If I wanted to communicate a shorter message, I'd use SMS, but if I'm telling a longer thought email is my go-to.

ajanuary• 13 years ago

The shortcuts for CC and BCC help a lot with adding recipients.

Obviously that doesn't do much to solve the problem of it squeezing them all onto one line when you focus out if you're paranoid about recipients.

RDeckard2• 13 years ago

I still use the basic HTML client in many circumstances, esp. when tethering off my phone with limited reception:

https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

It approximates the first Ajax/DHTML interface that Gmail introduced when it launched in 2004.

thrownaway24242• 13 years ago

The basic HTML view of gmail has no latency hiding abilities of any kind. It is much slower for every action, and it gets worse the slower your connection is. If you have a high bandwidth, high latency link like "4G" mobile service, ordinary Gmail is almost certainly better.

If course if you have something like GPRS then basic HTML is just the thing.

derefr• 13 years ago

I have a feeling that this new design ("docked floating div" instead of "new regular window"; "modal floating div" instead of "new fullscreen window") is an effect of Windows and OSX, in their latest iterations, pushing apps to fullscreen virtual desktops.

If Gmail is the whole screen, you can't actually open a "new window"; it would open back on the primary desktop, instead of within the app's screen. Maybe Windows+OSX need to refine their "app-desktop" solutions with some limited form of window management, so that every app isn't having to reinvent its own window management just to keep its windows visible...

rsynnott• 13 years ago

is an effect of Windows and OSX, in their latest iterations, pushing apps to fullscreen virtual desktops.

Hrm, possibly Windows 8 does that; haven't used it. To do it on MacOS, you have to either click the strange icon in the top right, or hit the highly obvious key combination CMD-CTRL-F. Anecdotally, most people don't even seem to realise that the fullscreen thing exists, unless it's pointed out to them.

amerika_blog• 13 years ago

The new Gmail compose is 20 years worth of interface design learning, lost in a single poor choice.

triplesec• 13 years ago

google is good at that. See the latest iteration of google maps for android. Ugh.

krakensden• 13 years ago

My favorite part is that it doesn't work with the hardware search or menu buttons.

thezilch6• 13 years ago

Clicking the "Full-screen" button on the compose modal shows the following dialogue; perhaps the author just closed the tip?

  Click here to exit full-screen.
  (Shift + click to compose in a new window.)

  You can set full-screen as your default using
  the More menu next to Discard.

Likewise, the tooltip on the "Full-screen" button states Full-screen (Shift for Pop-out). And for someone that spends so much time in email, like a developer and his IDE, it might be time to improve one's efficiency with keyboard coords -- gmail shortcuts (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594) -- and use Shift+c (popup) or Shift+d (tab) composition.

lnanek2• 13 years ago

I really hate that thing as well. Although it isn't just supposed to be quick, it is supposed to allow referencing several other emails while you write. Which I don't do so it is terrible for me.

ams6110• 13 years ago

Doesn't gmail still offer imap? Use a real mail client, not a web page. Much more fulfilling in almost every way. I like emacs, because I like to be able to write emails using the same editor I use for everything else. But that's a preference. There are many good mail clients to choose from.

bcj• 13 years ago

Of course that doesn't always protect you from Google's whims. Google purchased the company that made the mail client I like, Sparrow.

derekp7• 13 years ago

This is actually a good thing. I've always wanted to get better at HTML5 / "web 2.0" programming. Now I have an incentive. I think I'll just go ahead and make my own web mail client, with imap support, and host it on my own server (or AWS account). Can't think of a better way to learn than to have a good project (necessity and invention, and all that).

jfb• 13 years ago

Exactly. A "startup CEO" for whom email is his most important tool and he's baffled by a change to his client? Switch clients.

loceng• 13 years ago

I just shifted my behaviours to different tools that Compose is no longer suitable for. It was a bit of an annoying shift, though in the end felt more helpful with forcing me to organize.

paul_f• 13 years ago

Seems there is an easy solution. Just use Thunderbird.

oulipian• 13 years ago

The idiotic modal window is bad enough, but the new Gmail Compose also breaks basic shortcut keys (such as Command+left or right arrow to skip to the end of a line), at least in Firefox on my Mac. And pasting text in "Plain text" mode often adds weird line breaks. Gmail used to be such a pleasure to use and I cringe to click Compose now.

newobj• 13 years ago

Holy cow. I'm starting to experience outrage outrage and this post may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

colmvp4• 13 years ago

Indeed. Of all the 'usability nightmares' I've seen on the internet, Digg was by far the worst offender and deservedly so given the transition of users from Digg to Reddit. Gmail has made some odd changes (specifically compose on the bottom right) but ultimately it hasn't irked me at all. I mean, if people want a free e-mail service, they can still go to Outlook or Yahoo.

canthonytucci• 13 years ago

I'm not sure it's a good idea to take anyone's opinion of gmail seriously that doesn't use the keyboard shortcuts. If you really are composing so much, hit 'c', not reach all the way over to the mouse like an orangutan.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6594?hl=en

Pop the window out and maximize it if you don't like the new interface. If you hit d, it will open the compose window in a new tab, _the whole thing_, dedicated to your awesome email that you really need to concentrate on writing.

But as for the "hidden text formatting controls".

Don't use text formatting; send plain text email like a decent human being.

If you need to emphasize or:

1.e

2.nu

3.mer

4.ate

that's why we have markdown. No one wants to see your fancy fonts and fuchsia signature. Content, yo.

If it's that much of an issue, why not edit content in your favorite editor then paste it into gmail?

If you're on a mac, you can format to your heart's desire in textedit (full-screen-mode-obviously) then copy it all and paste into gmail and all your stupid font size changes and bold shit will still be there.

EDIT: minor changes, also imagine that the formatted stuff is the raw markdown, because I forgot that this does that.

Edit 2: it's cool to hate - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkRJzErnRmY

bane3• 13 years ago

Something that gets me in a little trouble from time to time, forwarding an email includes the entire previous conversation chain...which isn't normally a problem, but gmail compresses the previous chain into a collapsed [...] box that I sometimes forget is there. So on occasion I forward parts of emails to other parties that probably shouldn't be seeing those other bits.

I have to remember to expand it, then delete all the content I don't want to be included in the forward.

Other comments here have pointed other gui foibles, I agree with all the maps complaints, I'm on the beta for it and switch back to classic almost 70% of the time because I can't get something done in the new one.

And I won't repeat what I had to say about the absolute brokenness of the youtube interface.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6314694

Even in search, lots of the nice sidebar utilities I used all the time like the search tools' time range are now buried two clicks deep. Searches give you quick options for web, images, maps, shopping and applications, but one I use several times a day, video, is buried.

qu4z-23• 13 years ago

Forwarding the entire thread with each email is also bad netiquette. If anyone still cares.

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

I hated the feature at first as well, but I've found myself multi-tasking recently where I type multiple emails in parallel as I collect my thoughts for each. It's growing on me, but I definitely see the validity of the criticism. I do wish it was easier to get at the advanced features.

hobs• 13 years ago

I literally wrote dozens of complaints to google about this, obviously they go into a black hole of nobody cares, but I like their feedback feature because it says "What part of the screen is the problem" and I highlight EVERYTHING. The new youtube interface? Garbage. STEAMING GARBAGE. The new gmail interface? Sounds like you want a desktop client BECAUSE GARBAGE.

EDIT: AAAAAAH SERIOUSLY HOW CAN YOU REGRESS SO BAD!

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

Google have taken quite a few missteps with their UI changes to Gmail and Youtube especially. I'm not a designer, but as a web developer know a thing or two about easy-to-use and decent interfaces. The new Gmail compose popup to me signifies the once predominately engineer led company is turning into a design led one.

While being a design-led company isn't necessarily a completely bad thing, you need those engineers and developers guiding the designers and keeping things in check. Unrestrained creativity can be a dangerous thing.

I feel the same way about the new compose popup. It's intrusive and distracting and I even emailed them about it sometime ago. I got some cookie cutter response about how Google are continually refining their products, blah blah.

I would use a third party email client, but email is crucial for me and if the chances of something going wrong between the connection of the client and Google's servers are higher than that of losing an email composed within the Gmail interface itself.

Demiurge3• 13 years ago

I don't understand, why can't they just have the 'show all options and full screen' mode as well? They had it optional for a while now, what does it cost to maintain the old composer?

encoderer2• 13 years ago

tldr; Somebody moved her cheese.

habosa• 13 years ago

What gives me anxiety is complaining about minor UX changes for a class-leading free product on a site that's called "Hacker News". I hate to get all old-fogey but Hacker News has really turned into "the random opinions of people in the startup world". I learn a lot less on this site than I used to.

Sorry to the OP, it's not your fault that you provided content the community likes and I have no personal issue with you.

illumen• 13 years ago

It's comments like yours that I don't like. Also, I don't like this comment I'm writing.

Gmail had good UX, and people went to it for that. Now it has a few flaws. As people who care about UX, these flaws are worth discussing.

Some 'hackers' don't do UX, which is fine. So those people may find the topic boring. But many people here are making things, and find the UX direction of the leading web email client interesting. If only to see future trends in web site development. Other reasons this is interesting is to see how they are monetising their apps more, and how they are trying to make email a worse marketing channel.

Having worked at Google, it is understandable if you get annoyed when people bash your company. But that comes with being successful. So don't sweat it too much.

iak8god2• 13 years ago

I accidentally deleted an email thread the other day. How? When replying in Gmail, there's a little button below the editing area that has a trash can icon and will discard a draft. There's a button with an identical icon on the same screen, just above the editing area that will delete the email/thread. I don't know much about design, but this strikes me as an extremely poor interface.

ww520• 13 years ago

The new GMail Compose is a horrible horrible interface. It's bordering unusable. After looking around to disable it without any success, I started looking for alternatives. I ended up installing Thunderbird and couldn't be happier! With IMAP I can run Thunderbird on different machines and got the benefit of moving from machine to machine and still be able to access mail accounts.

Thunderbird is the way to go!

nnethercote• 13 years ago

The window size and position is fine; I like being able to easily refer to other emails.

It's what they've done to the editing that bugs me.

- It encourages top-posting. To bottom-post, you have to click the "..." button, and then remove the two blank lines at the top.

- Fast selection of text with shift-Pg{Up,Dn} no longer works.

- Firefox's "It's All Text" add-on, which lets you drop into a real editor to edit a textbox, no longer works with it.

ChrisArchitect• 13 years ago

"recently"? October 2012 this started rolling out....geezus.

curiousdannii• 13 years ago

And I opted out. I believe that it was only recently enforced on everyone.

GVIrish2• 13 years ago

I'd be curious to see what the opt-out rate on the new compose UI was. I like to adopt new UI improvements but that was one of the few that I immediately hated and switched back. I wonder if this feature was liked more or less than some of Google's other UI changes.

I get the feeling that Google is ignoring user feedback for some of these types of thing so they can push users towards their corporate goals. Youtube badgering people to switch to their Google+ username is a good example. Clearly a lot of people don't want to do that, yet they persist.

dmourati• 13 years ago

You know what I like about the new Gmail compose? Nothing.

tghw• 13 years ago

I find it very hard to have sympathy for someone who says "For better or worse, email takes up a large part of my work life." and then chooses to use a free, ad-supported email service.

If this is such a crucial tool for you, then you should be willing to pay a reasonable price for something you're happy with instead of just complaining about it online.

human_error• 13 years ago

Maybe she's a business user and pays for it. Business version also has the same bad layout.

mebreuer• 13 years ago

If you're such a heavy gmail user, I'd recommend using keyboard shortcuts for linking, formatting, adding cc/bcc, etc.

Once you enable them, you can easily check if you've forgotten by hitting ?, and within a month you won't have to touch your mouse (or navigate the UI) for anything save for the esoteric features.

rattray• 13 years ago

One trick I use for composing messages: Add "compose" as a search engine to chrome. I use the url https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&su= , which means I type "compose", hit `tab`, and then type the subject line of the email I want to send.

Makes for a nice way to get quickly to a distraction-free compose window.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Thunderbird

dhruvbaldawa• 13 years ago

Google products changes recently have been a pain to use. Damn, its so annoying coping up with these crappy UX changes nowadays

1. First of all the new Gmail inbox with the tabbed interface, it does not show you the number of unread mails in each of the tab, once you have opened a tab, the new mails count vanishes. There should at least be an option for enabling that.

2. Hangouts, it just sucks. Does not work reliably on a data connection, messages are received late. Can't discover online contacts on the UI easily. Makes it easier to chat but harder to find people to chat. I still don't get why did it replace a fully functional chat client with a half-baked piece of crap !?

I don't even want to get started about Google+, the connection model is very good, but the execution is very crappy. Why is Google forcing everyone onto Google+ ?

frank_boyd2• 13 years ago

Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

Anxiety over some feature?

If your anxiety doesn't come from the fact that you agree to the concept of the surveillance state (by using products like Gmail), then something is clearly wrong.

scrrr• 13 years ago

Yeah exactly. This should be a top comment. But apparently everyone is moving on, business as usual, as if the case were closed. And a lot of people could not access your accounts. And read your email.

Apparently some UI-issue is a bigger threat to user-satisfaction.

Weird.

frank_boyd2• 13 years ago

Weird.

I'd say frightening.

This is HN. Readers are people who understand and produce technology. People who also understand the nefarious potential it holds, if abused.

The situation just doesn't compute.

cpeterso2• 13 years ago

I sometimes wonder whether Google developers only use giant screens and don't realize how much the "comfortable" whitespace on Gmail and Google+ layouts detracts from the product on smaller screens or laptops.

comex• 13 years ago

I suppose this comment comes too late to have much visibility, but as for me, I can deal with the fullscreen popup thingy.

The inability to default to replying in plaintext to HTML mails is annoying, but I can deal with that, too.

What I can't deal with is the broken UX for the fake HTML elements, which were previously native controls that worked fine.

The To field is now a magic list of clickable email addresses instead of a regular textbox. Great, but clicking and dragging to select no longer works, typing with a selection active does not delete it, and undo no longer works.

The From field (for use with multiple email addresses), which used to be a native <select>, is now... a HTML reimplementation with no additional functionality. It sort of works from the keyboard - you can press space to bring up the list, up/down to choose an item, and enter to select. But it's not quite the same (as OS X, at any rate): the list starts with no selection rather than the current item, you can't press space again to close the list, and you can't choose an item by typing. In fact, if you try to do a few things in the new compose, including typing on the list, the keystrokes pass through to the greyed-out main window and you perform random email actions.

These interactions are not inherently critical: I could easily learn to live without them in general. But they work for every other like control in the OS, and they used to work here, so naturally I have and will retain muscle memory for them; the result is infuriating.

I'm actually quite surprised nobody has made a user script to fix these and the other issues in the three weeks since my account was forced onto the new compose; Gmail's obfuscation makes this a little more annoying, but not too bad if you stick to modifying elements rather than directly interacting with the JavaScript. I'll probably end up writing one myself.

robryan• 13 years ago

Personally I am a big fan of the new compose, although I can also understand why it isn't right for some people.

My usage would be something like 80% very short emails, 5 lines or under with maybe a copy paste block. Occasionally I will want to add an attachment or a cc.

The speed and the ability to still see the email list works for me. I should also add the majority of my gmail use is done on a 27 inch screen.

dcc1• 13 years ago

Whoever approved this change at Google deserves to be fired, its a serious usability fuckup

agumonkey2• 13 years ago

Composing a new message should be a lot more RESTful and first class, not a modal popup. I understand the on-the-fly desire but not at the cost of manipulation.

noir_lord• 13 years ago

I logged into an old Hotmail account the other day.

The new interface they are using is massively better than Google's, I fell in love straight away, it's actually quite lovely and very fluid to use.

tucosan• 13 years ago

If you have shortcuts enabled in gmail settings you can simply hit `d` (instead of `c`) and you get a full dedicated compose window in a new browser window.

So this is simply a non issue!

niuzeta• 13 years ago

I don't mind designers and/or developers changing their products. If they think they have something better(disregarding the contrived-ness of the term for now), they're more than welcome to provide me the new stuff.

Just don't take back my old stuff which I'm familiar with. Give us the choice, damn it.

goblin892• 13 years ago

If email is important to you, maybe you should take some time to set up an email client.

I personally am using Gmail from OS X Mail via IMAP for a couple of years now. Once you get used to the software, you can focus on reading and writing the mail—there's no distraction caused by continuous UI evolution.

airencracken• 13 years ago

If you don't like being subject to changes in your UI, then stop using a webapp that you have no control over. Use a sane client over IMAP and be done with it.

Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose

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