Its not just Gmail, they started doing this with other products too. Whenever I access Google Analytics [1], even if I am already logged in, it takes me to a page with a huge picture of a person smiling where I am supposed to find a tiny button that says "Access Analytics" inorder to access my account. I can understand such marketing material for new visitors but why on earth would you force this on existing customers???<p>[1] <a href="http://analytics.google.com" rel="nofollow">http://analytics.google.com</a>
Looks like there is a pattern -<p>New Google Analytics landing page - <a href="http://www.google.com/analytics/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/analytics/</a><p>Or Google Hangouts landing page - <a href="http://www.google.com/hangouts/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/hangouts/</a>
I would imagine they a/b tested this quite extensively and have data that smiling people's faces cause whatever metric they are measuring to be at a better point than a plain login page. It'd be interesting to see how much.
It's a marketing page. Would it be better to just have a login form like before? As long as Gmail itself remains minimalistic, what difference does a marketing page make?
After moving to outlook.com, The only thing I missed is that after I signing out of it, it takes me to a landing page with a "sign in" button and some advertisement with people smiling, instead of login screen.<p>looks like gmail is getting worse instead of outlook getting better in this particular aspect.
For a while now Google have been aggressively pursuing a marketing first approach to their product offerings, this is no different. The very fact Google have sneakily implemented ads disguised as emails into Gmail is a sign that Google are no longer a minimalistic company.<p>I think this is a case of someone making a big deal out of an obvious situation. Hardly an issue here.