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.

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!

(I'm still not a fan, as I can't use my old custom color scheme, but that's another matter)

Do you have JS disabled? They all have tooltips.

I highly recommend picking up the keyboard shortcuts, they are so amazingly fantastic. deleting, reading, labeling, archiving, marking important/unread. they all work wonders.

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.

Another interesting angle is that in the new interface, they had to add a dropdown menu to control the amount of padding used on UI elements (compact, cosy, comfortable). Had they gradually moved from compact to cosy, then to comfortable over a longer period, the need to provide an option might have been removed entirely. So some of the complexity avoided in having incremental changes over a fixed term has instead become software complexity needing maintained over a potentially longer or indefinite period.

In either case, a gradual transition would avoid the need for all this. For me, the two biggest gotchas with the new design was the text->icons change and associated relocation of some buttons, and the border change. Had the text->icons change been introduced distinctly, and allowed to stew for a few weeks - months, then the border size changed from compact to cosy for a few months, I possibly would have had no reason to complain at all (the amount of adjustment/effort required for each individual change is amortized over time, and by the time a new change appears, my comfort level has already returned to maximum for the current state of the UI).

You seem to be suggesting that having to learn something new is like having your brain die. That seems inaccurate. Isn't learning a (not very) different interface more like having to exercise a muscle a little bit that you were hoping not to exercise? I mean, not a cool thing to do to your users if the new interface is worse, but not inherently a bad thing.

It's the sort of thing that happens when a priesthood in a field comes to possess the One True Knowledge. They start to issue statements like "you can't trust your intuition" and "you don't understand this enough to like it yet"

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.

this very website proves that that is not necessarily true.

The problems are: small unreadable font, small controls/buttons, content too wide to read comfortably, doesn’t correctly support mobile, links that rely on cookies that expire (what is this? 1998?).

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

What it's not is incontrovertible proof that the new one is "bad". It might be great, but it's still a net loss of productivity while the users learn it.

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.

Fair or not, I feel like people who complain about it today (years after it launched) are just announcing, "I'm bad at adapting."

The answer to this is always "no."

Except this time.

It actively encourages exploration. That's good for some use cases, and it's certainly good for Microsoft.

Are you kidding me?

use ms office daily, love the ribbon.

I _was_ a proficient excel user once upon a time but now I feel like I'm trying to cook in my kitchen after some "organization expert" came in and moved all my stuff.

IMO, life is too short to have to re-learn stuff you already know.

The ribbon was annoying enough. But then I started manipulating using shortcut keys. And a subset didn't product the expected results.

I spent some years working heavily in Excel, including extensive on-the-fly worksheet structure modification (shoving data around, adding and deleting rows and columns, copying values or just the "text" portion of cells, etc., etc.). So those shortcuts were second-nature, or "muscle memory", as they say, if a bit stale.

It was a one-off, helping that person. I currently do a little budgeting in Excel, but without much such manipulation, so I haven't continued to trip across and so recall in detail what broke.

I do continue, in my more spiteful moments, to hope they reserve a special level of hell for the people who make such UI changes. For a subset of people, Excel is a heavy-duty industrial tool, and dicking with the UI is tantamount to dicking with their livelihood, not to mention peace of mind. At a minimum, implement and insist on backward compatibility (as an optional mode, at least), no matter how much your "rock star" designers piss and moan, or your Management pisses and moans about supporting multiple interfaces. You have a responsibility to the user base that has propelled your product to such success while integrating its functionality into their subconscious actions.

And that applies whether or not the change has merit. It's inherent in the process. So any analysis of a UI that starts with an "I HATE THE CHANGES!" blog post is flawed and (in the scientific sense) biased. Show some testing, write your own rant, or just sit tight.

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."

That said, I have trouble believing that changing the buttons from labels to icons could have possibly tested as an improvement. I'm with the OP; I have to mouse over every button and read the tooltip to find the Report Spam one.

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

It shows how to: get rid of "importance" markers, add some contrast back to the colors, remove superfluous whitespace, and most importantly, change the impenetrable icons back to text.

I'm failing to come up with a link at the moment, but I remember a widely circulated bit of folklore about how an unnamed engineer within Google set up a cronjob that anonymously e-mailed the entire team a single number every day. After a while people figured out that the number was the byte count of the front page, the implication was that it was a metric that needed to be watched carefully.

http://blip.tv/oreilly-velocity-conference/velocity-09-maris...

Just watch from 1:00 to 2:00 -> One Minute will answer the question.

Here she tells the story, how the first Google Design came to live. It is quite interesting. It seems, that minimalism wasn't a rational choice and that it came to stay only, because the data proofed it to be the right lucky choice.

I can understand, that the minimalistic homepage was a point of pride. I would be proud, to minify the homepage of the company I work for.

Which was the point I was making.

As for the world's simplest homepage, that was the reason I switched from AltaVista to Google in the first place. I only started noticing the better search results after I switched to avoid the clutter.

They just realised that users came to google to perform a single, clearly defined task and decided the home page should reflect that.

I wouldn't argue it was "respect for minimalism" but it was respect for functional simplicity.

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.

that also explains why my any of my searches failed to come up with any sources. anyways, if anyone wants to go here: http://googlesystem.blogspot.ca/2011/10/more-about-googles-n... it explains some of it. The division I was referring to is Google Creative.

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

What I was trying to say was that the problem isn't with A/B testing - it's with overly simplistic usage and interpretation of A/B testing.

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.)

I may be wrong. To confirm whether things changed or not, we'd need to get Google insiders to speak out on that subject.

There is another possibility, that direct (verbal) user feedback is discounted as being "anecdotal" and not included when making "data driven" design decisions. But as you mentioned, this is all speculation without an insider's POV.

My intuition, however, is that their data-driven technique over-optimizes the various minutiae while allowing broader flaws to persist. I'd chalk that up to a lack of design vision to guide the testing.

I think there was a clear line drawn at least with the G+ integration, since they started consolidating the appearance of all services under the same UI and same color codes. There is a now a clear "design vision" in Google (even if it clearly sucks bad) and it's clearly not as Engineers-driven/Fonctionality-driven as before. Having Icons without text next to it is not just a style issue: it's a well known flaw in terms of usability. Everyone knows icons+text are superior to icons only. Especially when your icons are dark grey on light grey background. No differentiation whatsoever. I can't believe someone was actually paid to do this.

At least, we can see there was a significant increase of "Gmail interface sucks" articles when the new UI came out. That has to represent some part of the users, to the least.

The problem is that the numbers don't matter in isolation. It's wrapped in two assumptions:

* That it's possible to make something that the vast majority of the population likes. Especially for something as complex and context dependent as email. No matter what Google does some section of the population won't like it.

* That it matters to Google (or any other company) that N% hate a product. I don't care if 75% of the world hates my product if the remaining 25% love it - and shovel money in my direction because of it.

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7117915617_c0c8cab3fc.jpg

If the response is "oh, no problem, just try to find this button, or hover on this very small area to trigger a non-obvious behavior"... we're probably not talking about good UX.

Thanks for your response, but this is shitty UI. Is the user supposed to sweep the entire screen, pixel by pixel, looking for Easter eggs?

That is the worst UX I've seen in a long time. Since when is blank space considered a target area to hover your mouse over.

You might be also interested to learn about this new peripheral that you put on your desk and wiggle, and--get this-- it makes a pointer on your screen move. Crazy, right? It will never catch on! Touch your desk to interact with the screen? What brain-dead idea will they come up with next?

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7100/7117915617_c0c8cab3fc.jpg

Any other wrong advice you'd like to try to contradict me with?

That should show you as many labels as possible. Because of the new multi-panel approach, you'll have to scroll down the sidebar if you have more labels than fit (like an iframe).

This is more bad (Easter-egg) UI: There's no visible control next to "chat" (or any of the other labels) until you've already rolled the cursor over it. Why would the user roll the cursor over there, if there are no visible controls?

It's incredible that we're LOSING common UI sense at such a rate.

Most desktop UIs are the same - there's all sorts of right click options on various UI elements, and have been for years. Drag and drop, drag to select, dragging stuff into your recycle bin or onto another folder to copy them.

How are you supposed to know that? By experimenting with your UI and learning how it works.

For websites, it shouldn't be necessary. I personally abhor the "hidden until hover" buttons that are becoming increasingly popular. I spent ten minutes trying to discover why GitHub had removed it's "edit issue" functionality until I realized that I had to hover over the issue text for the button to appear in the corner. It's horrible.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7101/6972254464_24774f868a_z.j...

Just for kicks, I switched to the default theme - same deal, mailboxes hide properly, etc. The red button's annoying, but hey, that's why I switched theme.

Perhaps you might want to quit flaming people (and Google) and fix your settings or browser or whatever the hell is wrong with your PC?

Further, he doesn't seem to be even the slightest bit interested in figuring out what's going wrong.