Why The New Gmail Sucks

Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by smackay on Monday September 23, 2013 @07:09AM (#6430046)

I think it's easy to underestimate or fail to appreciate the huge number of people who learned to use computers by rote. I have more than one relation who uses GMail by first typing "gmail" in the Google search bar. For them, just moving the send button would at least cause a hiccup in their workflow. Any UI optimization is a show-stopper.

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by tomkarlo on Monday September 23, 2013 @11:53AM (#6431785)

By that logic, we should freeze all Software UI where it is. Any UI change is going to run into some level of change aversion, no matter how brilliant it is. Software makers have to balance that with the need to keep innovating on a piece of software - otherwise someone else will just do it and make them obsolete.

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by pdonis on Monday September 23, 2013 @11:56AM (#6431817)

the need to keep innovating

Why is there a need to keep innovating on the UI for sending and receiving email? Why isn't this a solved problem? Why can't the innovators move on to some new problem whose solution would create much more value?

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by deegles on Monday September 23, 2013 @03:54PM (#6433717)

I suspect it's because "Delivered a new UI experience for Gmail" sounds great at review time. People get rewarded for delivering features and a new UI for an existing product is relatively easy vs. trying to create a solution for a whole new problem.

Unfortunately I don't see an easy answer to this.

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by tomkarlo on Tuesday September 24, 2013 @12:47AM (#6436045)

Or maybe because it's a huge, intensely competitive market where multiple top-tier companies are trying to draw users from each other: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo. You can't stand still and expect your user base to keep growing. You might make your current users unhappy sometimes, but the goal is to keep getting new users, not just hold onto the ones you have.

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by pdonis on Tuesday September 24, 2013 @11:23AM (#6438460)

the goal is to keep getting new users, not just hold onto the ones you have

I understand that this is the current goal of the companies you named, but, to put it bluntly, why should I care? My goal is to not have to deal with change just for the sake of change, or because some company wants to keep capturing new users. (Which is why, as I've said in other posts in this thread, I don't use GMail, don't use MS or Apple products, don't keep upgrading my Linux desktop just because somebody invented a new UI, etc.)

Also, "keep getting new users" isn't a sustainable goal anyway. Facebook already has more than a billion users; they don't have too much further to go before everyone that has Internet access at all (apart from a few outliers like me) will have a Facebook account. What do they do then?

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by tomkarlo on Monday September 23, 2013 @05:26PM (#6434275)

You're kidding, right?

We could also just keep using lynx for web browsing. It worked fine.

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by pdonis on Monday September 23, 2013 @06:59PM (#6434726)

We could also just keep using lynx for web browsing. It worked fine.

I'll gladly admit that having a browser that does graphics is a huge improvement over a browser that only displays text, like lynx. But browsers have been supporting graphics since what, 1995? Earlier?

Since graphical browsers appeared, IMO, there has been exactly one UI innovation in browsers that was worth the effort to re-learn things: the Chrome UI, that basically got rid of the UI except for the address/search bar and the browser window itself. I'm fine with having to re-learn where all the menu options are if I need them, in exchange for that simplification. But that happened in what, 2008?

Of course there have been plenty of changes behind the scenes in browsers, such as security fixes, support for HTML 5 and updates to Javascript, etc. None of those affect the UI, and I'm not talking about those kinds of changes. I'm talking specifically about changes to the UI that force people to re-learn things for no good reason.

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Re:Why The New Gmail Sucks by hartator on Monday September 23, 2013 @03:36PM (#6433601)

> I have more than one relation who uses GMail by first typing "gmail" in the Google search bar.

How you do it? I feel like typing gmail in chrome versus the url is less error prone and is more easy.

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