If Adobe redesigned the Photoshop interface they'd instantly love half their market share, as people using software professionally don't like or have the time to learn something new just because it's better in some odd way.
Microsoft did that with Office, the whole Ribbon fiasco, but to their defense: - Office 2003's UI was extremely complicated; GMail's new extra steps are nothing in comparison. - The Ribbon UI was well designed from the start. - All (or most) keyboard shortcuts stayed the same. - Microsoft actually did extensively test the new design and, being Microsoft, it will be supported for a long time.
Adobe probably wouldn't be able to pull that off, and it looks like even Google can't anymore.
Gmail is designed for everyone and has to support the full spectrum of users, in particular the new ones (because they're the ones picking new email accounts - consider that they're partially trying to target people who still don't have email). Photoshop is designed for a very select set of power users. Saying Gmail's interface is becoming less like Photoshop and that's bad makes no sense at all.
You probably wouldn't recommend Photoshop to your Grandma - you'd tell her to use Picasa or iPhoto, both of which I suspect have far more users.
If it's just griping that he doesn't like the changes, fine, but if his point is that these are bad changes that don't make sense for the product, then he needs to pick a better analogy.
Everyone wants simpler, more intuitive products, unless it disrupts their particular workflow. http://xkcd.com/1172/
Photoshop is extremely customisable and full-featured which is what I was getting at. Draw Something is fun and light which works well as a mobile app.
I don't know about the average email user but after 10,000+ hours of using email, I feel like I'm pretty proficient at email :)
It's pretty easy to come up with a bunch of arbitrary gripes about any major UX change. But you haven't made any effort to contemplate why these changes might make a lot of sense.
For example, you're complaining about the need to do two clicks to make a link, but it seems to me that 90% of the time people just paste in a URL and gmail deals with it properly. Separately entering a link and URL is more like writing HTML and I don't expect regular users do that... and frankly, I'd rather just have the URL anyway. If you knew that users were only using the "add link" icon maybe 1% of the time, wouldn't you move it down a level as well? Or just get rid of it?
I'm a super, super heavy Gmail user - I average ~6,000 emails a month received on my work account, and a smaller but similar flow on my personal gmail. I know and use the keyboard shortcuts. I generally find the mole and the new text formatting UX a bit annoying - but from a product usability perspective - not a design perspective - I can see why they make a lot of sense.
It's just I'd like my gmail web app to be more full featured. We can make it chat-like for mobile. I'm glad you're not encumbered by it though.
Expect to see more web services looking more like mobile, because while it used to be they were primarily web sites with mobile access, they're turning into mobile apps with some desktop web access. Installed base on PC vs. mobile should cross over this year, and usage trend is already ahead of that for lots of services.
If anything, the new Gmail with all the hiding and obfuscation going on is going affect the new users the most. The other users atleast know that something is possible and will hunt around for an option, but the new folks automatically assume that some things are just not possible. For example, editing subject when replying or forwarding.
Obviously not. I just wish Gmail would work more like The GIMP.
but I do not agree with your statement.
.. means the UX is bad. Just because it's an advanced tool doesn't mean it needs to be unreasonably difficult to wrap your head around. Pixelmator isn't as powerful, but the UX for most of what it does far exceeds Photoshop's similar features.
There's a reason why users love apps like Draw Something or (more relevantly) Instagram or Paper. They're able to easily achieve the results they want without investing a huge amount of time in learning the software. Why is that so hard to understand? Not everyone wants to invest 40+ hours in learning Photoshop.