I write long emails in Gmail. The new compose doesn't bother me at all. I feel like that if Gmail always looked like that, nobody would complain. But since something changed, we get a bunch of articles about how Google knows nothing about UX.

Probably the same team that has usage data for hundreds of millions of users.

I'm gonna quote @kevingadd from down below because I can't say it better myself: "The new gmail is streamlined for particular purposes and not for others. You'd think that one of the biggest data companies in the universe would be able to gather actual data about how people use their software and ensure they aren't making it significantly worse to use for subsets of the customer base. Maybe this is what Google actually did, and they decided they don't care about the 1-10% of their users who use gmail for anything other than sending glorified SMS messages to people."

The new gmail is a toy for kids.

Glorified SMS? I get that the compose window is smaller but this is pretty unbelievably hyperbole. On my main screen, I get over 4000 characters before having to scroll and even on my 13" laptop screen, I can fit close to 1700 characters in the compose window before I get a scroll bar (http://cl.ly/image/0H1A2O3u251U). In contrast, the "old" version only gives me about 650 characters on my small screen (http://cl.ly/image/0h3O2H3g0P21). Perhaps I'm missing something but this seems to free up real estate.

It's glorified SMS in that the designer of the feature has explicitly said that they changed the design so that it would basically be glorified chat:

> What it looks like, really, is a slightly oversized version of Gchat. And that’s no accident. Google’s actively trying to make email less fussy and formal--or, in other words, to make it a little more like instant messaging. And as Jason Cornwell, Gmail’s lead designer, explains, one of the ways to do that is simply to "give you permission to write shorter messages." [...]

> "It was a space that was sort of intimidating, I think, to write a message like 'Hey, wanna get lunch?'" he explains. "We wanted the new compose to facilitate these quicker messages. Or at least make it a space where that felt appropriate."

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672250/how-a-tiny-new-compose-w...

"hey, let's meet for coffee soooooooon! your shout? :-)"

Dear Google, please don't feel you need to give me permission to write the above. And definitely don't remove or change handy features to achieve such an objective. It's my business how I compose email, and my responsibility for justifying the occasions where a formal style is needed vs casual. Just make the interface useful and stop trying to turn email into something it's not.

Guess I'm a kid, then? I find it faster to write an email on it than I did before and I like the ability to compose with another email in the background.

GMail has some bits I don't like, but by and large I'm a pretty big fan.

I would love to see Google design a car with usage data. It would have one door and the trunk would be perpetually open.

But it would be self driving..

Please... Usage data is irrelevant. The UI design at google is now being run by dictat from the top. User studies and survey results are massaged until they can be contorted into conclusions that suite the already made design decisions.

You're obviously going to need to justify that, since Google are fairly well known for heavy A/B testing, collect a tonne of data and make probably the most popular analytics tool on the web.

That was before Marisa left.

No not really. This is my observation and I'm sharing it. That's it.

Which can yield erroneous results if not used properly:

http://www.stanford.edu/~savage/flaw/Article_files/image002....

I thought good design was about designing for the extremes, not the mass majority of people that don't use your product to the fullest.

What bothers me most about gmail is the flat conversations, where you can't see that a message was a reply to an email in the middle of a thread.

It seems I'm almost alone thinking this way, though -- it's not a complaint I often hear from other people.

It seems like concept of threading is too complicated for average user these days. All the new & trendy software for communication have no threading capabilities -- Discourse, Google+, Github issues, Moot.

Threading is good for reading through one time and when there are many topics of interest. Email is something you often return to again and again and topics are organised using subject headers. Email discussion view was introduced by google a very long time ago before almost anyone else did it. It is a bit of a cosmetic trick where it just sorts emails that have the same subject. Threading does not jive with the way Email technology is structured.

Remember when Google tried to build a brand new huge piece of technology meant to revolutionise communication on the web? Nobody adopted it, was called Wave.

How exactly does threading ‘not jive with the way Email technology is structured’? In-Reply-To: and/or References: are pretty much all you need for threading.

Reddit is bigger than all of those, combined :)

And Facebook added threaded comments recently too

At least we still have sane threading here at HN.

I agree; that's one thing that I notice, especially in an email chain with a lot of people in it. What would you like to see Gmail do about it?

Indenting and maybe vertical lines to help the reader figure out the threading would be an improvement. However, I don't think this is good enough in a long email chain. The way traditional email readers solve this is, of course, is with two views, one of threaded email subject and another for contents (http://www.davep.org/mutt/screenshots/). I don't think gmail will ever adopt this interface, though.

agree

> Who the hell decided it was a good idea to make you type your email in what is basically a slightly larger chat window?

If you need more space, the box expands; there is also a pop-out button so you can make it as big as you want.

> Who decided it would be a good idea to put the "reply" edit box at the end of a potentially very long email?

There is also a 'Reply' button right at the top of the email. You don't need to scroll at all.

It's not that bad, definitely not terrible.

That's how it is, considering about 40% of emails being opened on mobile, and this share is growing - http://i.imgur.com/8hPUHY2.png

What a horribly misleading graph.

What exactly is misleading in that graph?

That graph is misleading, if they were honest their scale would be 0%...100%

not 0%...50%

That's what disingenuous presentations do when they want to make a graph scary, they cut the axis to scale the data and ditch the sense of perspective.

Made worse by the fact that the author didn't need to do that at all. Going from 10% -> 40% is a hell of a jump, even in perspective that's impressive.

It'd be good to get the gmail team's thoughts on this.