News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by abraham on Friday April 27, 2012 @02:08PM (#3900317)
> 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.

Re:GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism by ajross on Friday April 27, 2012 @03:48PM (#3900746)
You say potato, I say potato. To someone who spends their working life in gmail (or whatever) having it suddenly go away, being replaced with a different tool which requires different workflows is certainly a "disaster" in some sense. It's an equivalent annoyance, for example, to losing one's laptop or phone and having to restore a new one from scratch (assuming you have working backups anyway).

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.