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.

Nope. Screen shot:

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

Ok, upon closer inspection of your original screenshot, it appears you need to hover the padding-area between "Chat" and the border line above -- a separator between labels and the chat modules. You should notice a resize cursor and an ellipsis icon; this separator is movable and reveal more of your labels, without having to hover the labels area to reveal them.

Important tip based on what I see in this thread from multiple people:

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.

Why would I move the cursor to an area in which there are no visible controls?

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?

You've never hovered over the chat area? Nonetheless, the bar could could probably use a hint when also hovering the labels area. I'm still unsure how you have written off the designers as simply inept. I could take down any UI with such an attitude.

Excuse my language. But are you fucking kidding me ?

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.

Wince every OS (MacOS and Ubuntu and Google anyway) adopted on-mouseover scrollbars and click corner to resize?

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?

I get a scrollbar in that pane when it's too small to display all the labels. That makes it pretty obvious, it's strange that you don't have one.

You have never thought to click the edge of a box to drag its border to enlarge the box?

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.

This is my major gripe as well ...

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

WRONG. All of my labels/mailboxes are set to show:

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

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

You can hide the chat box. Look for a button at the bottom center of the sidebar (so lower left of the entire screen).

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).

Thanks for the chat-box info.

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.

That's a very common UI mechanism on the web. The alternative is to have a bunch of handles and buttons plastered over everything.

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.

But it's one thing to learn a UI for your whole OS. You learn it once, and you're done.

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.

Well, it works just fine for me. Look, non-eyeburning theme, different coloured stars, non-hidden mailboxes.

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?

Nice downvote, but compare his screenshot and mine. There's something pretty clearly wrong with his stylesheets or browser or something. There are no visible controls in his new GMail section - something that nobody else seems to have.

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