Ask HN: Anyone from Google here? The new Gmail UI is painful
Looks like Google is rolling out the new Gmail UI to users, and removing the option to revert back to Classic UI.
The new UI is painful to look at, to be honest. Anyone from Google here want to mention to the Gmail team that the new UI is going to chase long-term users like myself off the platform?
282 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadGmail has been my last reservation on dropping Google entirely, and I think this is the last straw for me.
I feel like being forced to choose between two bad versions of GMail.
- just a user
1. I don’t agree with it, and
2. Gmail team is already painfully aware that any given change will be unappealing to a subset of users.
3. They are probably already here, taking note, considering.
Unfortunately we can’t all have a custom UI written exactly to our specifications. Gmail team has to try to do what they think is best for most users. For the rest, there are various gmail UI tweak extensions for Chrome and Firefox, or you can write your own userscript or use an IMAP client.
I would love if Gmail team went forward and shared a bit about how they get data on what's best for most users. This would probably alleviate many complaints, by letting complainers (like me) know how dissimilar they are to majority of users.
> For the rest, there are various gmail UI tweak extensions for Chrome and Firefox,
Given the state of browser extension market, this is inviting users to selfpwn.
> or you can write your own userscript
Isn't this against the TOS? Even if it isn't, this solves the problem only for couple frustrated users with enough knowledge and too much time on their hands.
> or use an IMAP client.
Fortunately, yes, for now. I hope Google doesn't decide to abandon IMAP.
This isn't what most people are asking for though, they just want Google to not make the UX worse. Increasing the page load time and making a bunch of styling changes for no appreciable benefit makes the app worse, not better. If a lot of people are wishing the dev team had just done nothing, it's probably a sign that the changes aren't warranted.
If they improve the speed and make it work as fast as the previous version did, I think most users will learn to live with the new UI.
The fact that you think so makes it hard to take anything else you've said seriously.
Or do you mean that a change which regresses for a small number of users while improving for most is bad? In which case this is not correct and I'm happy to elaborate on why.
If most users are like most non-techies I know, I assure you, they do care. There's just nothing they can do, beyond telling first couple people they encounter that they hate the new UI, and carrying on with their lives. Because what are they going to do? Move 10 years of their e-mail history to Microsoft and IM/phone 500 people about their new address?
--
This is, by the way, my fully generic response to "the market shows users like web bloat". No, they don't. They just don't have a choice but to accept it.
The gmail product forums, monitoring sites like reddit, HN, and Twitter, focus groups and UX studies, internal dogfooders and trusted external testers, metrics from experimental or holdback groups, etc.
When that happens, I will likely give up on reddit entirely.
And it looks like they removed the option to turn Undo off, so now I have to wait 5 seconds to my message to actually be sent.
I'm so used to Google products being fast and feeling almost like a desktop application. This new interface feels like a web app from 2000's. Makes me want to go back to using Thunderbird for mail.
Also, nice coincidence that those multiple ask hackernews questions about alternatives to gmail popping up before this release last week.
Second, even if you do need to change apps, you don't need to change addresses if you have your own domain.
Mailbox.org as of now seems to be good except that they have started to either reply to emails quite late or sometimes simply ignore it[0] and the general lack of non-German language pages across their portal [1].
[0] Maybe because they have officially stopped anything but community/forum support for paying customers in €1 and €2.5 per month plans -https://mailbox.org/en/fees-and-conditions/
[1] https://help.mailbox.org/servicedesk/customer/user/login?des... Yes, one can guess or use Google translate but there's no translated page for this.
You are aware they're an Australian company that will be forced to provide Oz government access to your account?
I wrote the comment especially in the light of people tripping across parent's recommendation. (There are lots of other threads here on HN indicating how people wish to migrate from gmail to something else, due to other Google/Alphabet Inc issues.)
"Where requests for access are issued legally, we comply." [0]
[0] https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/
I just got it for email hosting at $3/mo, but they provide a host of other tools aimed towards businesses.
https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report
Threatening to quit is the equivalent to Godwin."Ima gonna quit" is probably the saddest thing to share on the Internet.
Also, the new UI is a complete UX disaster.
Iterations are going on. There is a school of thought that believes any kind of movement is progress. May it movement into good or bad direction. Thats why companys regulary rehaul their apps, the design and corperate identity. It always end with some people becoming unhappy, but hopefully more people being happy.
The web-everything world we live in right now has led to a cambrian explosion in new UI metaphors and visual design. I can only hope at some point we all wake up and decide that GNUMail running on GNU Hurd has gotten really stable, and that maybe we should all just re-adopt open protocols and native apps.
I guess the way Google works is: let’s ship something quickly(1) and then slowly(2) improve it.
(1) quickly: 2 years
(2) slowly: 4 years
One thing I still don't understand is why they wouldn't let people to use the old interface. Come on, it's just the UI, why force your taste on everyone?
Without question, Google services are the worst I currently use in my daily life. I would honestly be embarrassed to have my name attached to many of their products.
This is a place where the metaphors of material design subtract more value than they add.
Now, I don’t really care about Gmail’s UI because I use IMAP. Apple Mail improved their UI just enough that Gmail’s regressions took it below the line. But I don’t really care, because Gmail’s spam filtering is still much better than Fastmail, which I know from having tried switching for a couple years.
The unnecessary animations irk me. I'm clocking 5-10 seconds to load and render my inbox, on a quad-core i7 with oodles of RAM and a fat network pipe. Whereas the basic view loads in 700 ms...
Basic view is 9 requests for 24 kb...
And GMail, bless it, when I login through the company's system clocks me through to a "Choose which account" system. My reaction is to open a new tab and login again, and it usually takes me straight through to the actual email without repeating the request for credentials.
The whole thing feels clunky, slow, and confused underneath. I don't much care about the look, that comes and goes, fashions change, but the experience as a whole has become painful.
If you don't want to do that (e.g. because you want all your email tabs in the same window), you can just use the account switcher on the top right, or just change the 0 in the URL to a 1 or 2 or whatever.
Bonus, even read your emails offline!
<s>Innovation!</s>
(They did spin off Opera Mail as a separate app, but I see no point in it, since it's just Opera 12 with the browser part disabled).
It's a bit clunky, but it's the best for serious people.
It was/is great, but I didn't find a compelling reason for myself to shell some bucks over their way vs. using Opera Mail or Thunderbird. What are the killer features for you?
It does have per-account adjustable syncing periods, and you can click a big ol' button to refresh immediately.
Having an API unable to support two clients (Classic and New) would be embarassing from an engineering POV.
And from an UX POV, it really lacks empathy (or realism) to assume that the same exact UI will be useful/pleasant to literally 1 billion users. There are all kind of reasons why a given person might prefer UI a to b (a being older having nothing to do).
As you reach more humans, you have to embrace diversity. The views from a handful of hipster designers in SF shouldn't irreversibly impact how the rest of the world interacts with their computers.
You nailed it, but large private sector companies like Google (or Apple) have no genuine feedback loops: they do not care, because (1) vocal dissenters will never represent more than a rounding error of the user base, and because (2) there are no obvious exit options.
It's Fordism ("you can have it any colour, as long as it's black"), only with 21st century tech.
They ditched the original – and best – UI years ago. Each iteration has dropped visual cues and made it harder for the eye to distinguish elements from each other. GMail has just been relegated to spam duty for me since then.
Basic HTML mode at least still has a decent UI.
I used to visit Google News multiple times per day. Then the UX went to hell there too. Each iteration became worse. After the latest changes, it became so unbearably hideous and clunky that I couldn't stand it anymore. I got mad every time I loaded the site. But years of keyboard memory still had me typing in the URL constantly, getting mad every time it loaded up. I finally black holed it in /etc/hosts to break the habit.
Gmail is in a similar state now. The new UI is hideous and clunky. And on the engineering side, it takes multiple seconds to load up. I thought Googlers were supposed to be known for their engineering competence?
Calendar? Bleh. It's still in a tolerable state, but visually the previous release was easier to work with.
Bring back contrast. Bring back visual dividers. Stop with the clown buttons like the mega "Compose"... these are tools we use for years and we had our first-run experiences over a decade ago.
Fire whoever is driving your god awful UX on web.
The lack of consistency and common sense is unbelievable.
The only reason why Android has a user-friendly UI is because Google copied the design from Apple in 2007.
I have the feeling that UX specialists are actually the problem. When you employ people to work on UX and design, well, they will work on it, even if there is nothing to do. So you get periodic redesigns that improve nothing but justify the existence of a bunch of people whose purpose in life is to propose UX changes.
That's precisely what I find scary about those UX changes: they to run counter-current of everything I value in UX (clean and compact vs. bloated and spread out).
The new GMail seems like a more functional “new Reddit”. It achieves a certain look and was probably metric driven, but didn’t really address what users care about.
As a casual GMail user, I like it. But it would drive me crazy if I had to work with it all day with my work mail volume.
The "random content boxes and buttons floating in a sea of pure white" seems to be the latest awful trend in web design. I get that borders and shadows are out of style, but they are necessary for visually grouping things together.