How to cope with the Gmail redesign

This article made me finally bite the bullet and convert. I've been using the new design for the last several hours. I happen to have a window open with the old design, so I know it's not merely my imagination that the new one is worse. Not enormously so, but definitely worse.<p>Read mails are more legible in the old version, because there is more contrast between black letters and the old light blue background than between black and the new gray.<p>It's also harder to parse the list of emails visually in the new design. In the old one, the 3D checkbox acted like a bullet point, and the name of the sender was closer to it. Now the heavy checkbox has been replaced by a faint square, and the sender's name is about 2x further away from it. So scanning my email is no longer like scanning a bulleted list. It's just rows of text.<p>That's a big deal functionally. There's a reason bulleted lists exist as a format, and removing the bullet points from the average bulleted list would make it significantly less legible.<p>It's a bummer to see Google making things work worse in order to make them look better (or worse still, more consistent). That's the sort of thing big companies do. Which I suppose Google now is. But they had at least been trying not to act like one before.

Its a constant wonder how Google and other large companies can't actually realise that their design departments are not doing a great job. You'd think that Apple's successes might actually make them realise that great interfaces (especially if they can outdo the competition) are hugely valuable.<p>Some things about the new design are defensible, however others are definitely not. My particular pet hate is that all the things that are not mail services (but you can still access within gmail) are splattered around all corners of the screen. Chat is in one corner (along with 'gadgets' - whatever they are). G+ is in the opposite. And in a third (behind a button that is very unhelpfully named 'gmail') are contacts and tasks. Where is the sense in that???

Personally I really like the new design, despite the fact I have actually implemented most of the things mentioned in the article. However, I thinks that this shows that gmail is an amazing app that it provides this level of customisation, and this doesn't include any of the stuff from the labs feature set.

I ended up leaving Gmail a few months ago (knowing this was coming). The new design works <i>really poorly</i> with browser zoom. I need to view the page zoomed in to 300% or so most of the time (I don't have good vision). Zooming really worked pretty well on all of the past iterations, up until this one. There are a number of panes that stay visible when scrolling, so the content area on the web page becomes really really small. (I'm not usually one to complain just because things changed, I didn't like the mystery meat icons either, but I can get over something trivial like that.) It just doesn't work.<p>I couldn't really figure out where else to go, but OWA 2010 doesn't have these problems, so I went to Office 365 for my own domain (and forwarded Gmail). I never thought I'd pay for email but considering how vital mail is, having real support is a nice piece of mind.<p>I remember how awesome webmail seemed in 2003 (when I switched from Outlook to Gmail), but now that I've gone back to Outlook, I see all the awesome stuff that I was missing. This is really not to credit Outlook though, I'm sure Gmail (threading) influenced them greatly in the past 8 years. I know you can just use Outlook+Gmail, but sadly IMAP isn't nearly as good as Exchange.

I quite like the new design, and I've been using it since it was in "beta" a couple of months ago.<p>It certainly provided a couple of frustrating days before I got used to it, but I find it much more soft on the eyes - to me the old layout now looks pretty harsh; giving the impression of being just "functional".<p>A lot of non-technical folks I work (and live!) with find the new design much, much more pleasing. Bear in mind these are the folks that use hotmail, yahoo etc - so they really are after the "eye candy" more than the functionality; and with google's new social push I can assume this is now the target audience.<p>My only complaint would be about the icons; regardless of wether you've used Gmail before - you will get caught out; a few days ago it took me a good few minutes before I could find out how to get to my contacts.

I am absolutely furious how my account was forced today to the new theme - it's hideous.<p>I've tried several stylish options to no avail, I miss the old dark layout with high contrast buttons.<p>Even the dark theme has a bright white message pane for no reason.<p>It also runs very sluggishly compared to the old UI, not sure why.<p>Well this should give me the kick in the pants to get off gmail anyway.

I designed the original Gmail UX and I have to admit I'd changed every pref in my accounts exactly as Jason did. Good call.

I have never been so frustrated with a UI redesign as I have been with Gmail and Analytics. Unfortunately, I was already using all of the settings pointed out in this post, and I still can't get comfortable with the new design. I can't separate how much of that frustration comes from the large degree of change and how much comes from my long history of use, but the frustration is huge.<p>I know that many Google employees were similarly frustrated when they were eating their dog food last august. Yet the new look was rolled out anyway.<p>So I can only assume that the company had solid UI data showing that their target group of users prefer the new design. And I can therefore only assume that the target group of users does not include users like me.<p>Consequently, there is an opportunity here for somebody to do email right for the people frustrated by the new gmail redesign. I would happily pay for an email interface that makes sense and doesn't change against my wishes... especially if it doesn't require switching to microsoft.<p>Until then, I will be very grateful to the person who pointed out the 'slow-connection' interface is still available.

My biggest new-Gmail-design pet-peeve is that the Display Density setting is <i>only</i> respected if your browser window is wide enough.<p>I prefer the "Comfortable" setting. I have a 22" monitor at 1680x1050, but I don't have my browser window maximized (it only takes up 65-75% of the screen width).<p>So, GMail has helpfully reduced my display density to "Cozy", ignoring my setting.<p>As far as I know, there's no way to "fix" this; it's a known issue but there's no workaround other than making my browser window wider.

I'm obviously in minority here, but I don't stress too much about the design as long as unread messages are in bold text. But this might be due to me working mostly in terminals and text/code editors, where design never was a top priority.<p>The things I care about most in gmail are:<p><pre><code> 1. reliability, speed and lots of space 2. good spam filtering 3. web view of various office documents (I used to cringe when someone sent me .doc or .xls, not anymore) 4. fast search which also includes gtalk conversations (invaluable) </code></pre> If one or two of these things goes away, then I'll probably switch.

I was so busy using gmail I barely noticed the transition. Which for me says everything. Great design shouldn't be noticed, it should just work.<p>Obviously this is just one anecdote. But for me gmail is still the indispensable tool it always was. For all its shortcomings it is an amazing product.

I HATE HATE HATE the new design! I was dreading the day they took away the old look, but these tips go a long way to making gmail usable for me again. Thanks!

When I read this headline, I assumed Google had redesigned it again... didn't realise people were still using the old design.<p>Personally, the redesign pushed me back to Thunderbird and I ended up deleting thousands of emails. It was quite liberating.

I loved the new design. Much less clutter. A service I use every waking moment need not label everything. I like the direction of Google's design efforts.<p>The Google+ design will continue to evolve, I'm sure (it is not quite there yet).

Its not just GMAIL. Google analytics is painfully ugly. The first screen before showed a list of all the sites and traffic. Now it shows just the list of accounts. Its awful. There is no way anymore to use the classic design.<p>Also, once I am in google analytics it is just a UI mess. They cram every feature possible and make it unintelligible. They are ruining the UI for gmail,google search and google analytics.

I also hate the new design, even after few hours I've spent trying to get used to it. With all the necessary settings (compact mode, text buttons etc.), the main flaw stays - theres no freaking border between message body and ads! C'mon Google, this is just too obvious. Wonder how users will switch to some other webmail or desktop clients, how many of them will install some ad-blockers, just because of this. You realise, Google, that this would mean actually less clicking on your ads? Speaking of intentional clicks here.

besides the default theme and the high contrast theme, all others are useless and look like the work of a 5 year old. Design has a function, namely to make things clear and give the user a good experience.

I know I was probably 1 of 10 people that actually used (and liked!) the Terminal theme with all green monospaced text... sadly that is now gone, and Terminal theme is now just a lame white on black with variable-width font. bummer :(

I use the following changes to the style sheet for some more colour contrast:<p><pre><code> /* Increase contrast on some arrows */ .T-I-ax7.T-I-JE .T-I-J3 { opacity: 0.1 !important; } /* Make new chat highlight red instead of blue */ .Hz .k, .Hz .n, .Hz .l { background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% rgb(192, 0, 0) !important; }</code></pre>

I stopped using it and moved to Mail.app. I cannot stand in-page scrolling.

I can't imagine using gmail for high-volume email; I've used it at various times due to being lazy about setting up something better, but ugh.<p>mutt is so much better, using maildirs synced with imap (with mbsync or something). Totally customizable, per-folder triggers, and works in a terminal.

Using a web-service and raging when it gets redesigned or closed is pretty stupid. People who don't like when other people decide for them should use real email clients with a standard protocol such as IMAP.

What concerns me more about the new design compared to the old original is the readability: now it is much worse. Why not offer the most popular old themes (adapted to the new layout) an option?

You can actually still use the old interface for a little while longer, even if you've been forced over to the redesign.<p><a href="http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail" rel="nofollow">http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail</a>

My single largest complaint about the redesign?<p>When you search your messages, the buttons to go to the next page of search result are inexplicably only at the top of the results, not at the bottom.<p>Before I realized this design oversight, I spent a few minutes perplexedly scrolling to the bottom of search results, flabbergasted that those were all the results.<p>You can imagine my frustration at the design team when I finally realized: Oh, the pagination buttons are at the top...

This could be of interest to some of the readers. I'm the developer of Gmelius, a poly-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox, <a href="http://gmelius.com" rel="nofollow">http://gmelius.com</a> . The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.<p>NB: As you will surely notice I'm currently redesigning the homepage... Feel free to leave me your comments/suggestions both on the extension and the new website.

Coincidentally, AskMetafilter has a good thread about fixing the redesign: <a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/213264/You-dont-know-what-youve-got-til-its-gone-Gmail-Im-looking-at-you" rel="nofollow">http://ask.metafilter.com/213264/You-dont-know-what-youve-go...</a>

I totally disagree, more blank space make it easier to read, the BIG problem of the redesign are icons that doesn't clearly mean what they do.<p>But hey, it's nice that you can revert a bit.<p>(but i must be satan, i also like FB timeline)

A year or two ago I got tired of my email UI changing every week, so I switched to the "plain HTML" view. It's not as fast or smooth or javascript-y but I don't think it's changed a bit in years.

There are 2 distinct threads woven through this discussion. One directly addressing Gmail's redesign which touches mainly on UX and implementation issues. The other being the more perennial debate between desktop vs. web mail clients. I wish HN allowed for comment collapsing at least which would make this and other conversations easier to follow just the threads that are of interest. (Reddit has this, not sure why HN doesn't)

You can talk IMAP/POP and SMTP, and you get to control your own user interface, or you can talk HTTP, HTML, and JS and abdicate control to someone else. I fell into that trap myself. I was a heavy user of Gmail for about four years, and when they started changing things and told me "only 0.07% of users use that feature we just removed", it was too late.<p>This mayhem ruined "the cloud" for me ... and I used to help run parts of it. Blah.

Their spam/filtering has gone down hill. It does a great job with the spam. Unfortunately, several people I communicate with a few times a day, half of their stuff goes straight to the trash and I don't see it. If I login to webmail I can see they have both an Inbox and Trash label on them but my phone and mail client to register the new mail and it doesn't show in the Inbox. I just want it to pick one.

Another trick I found is to go into Labs and enable the one that moves the in-browser chat box to the right side of the inbox. It's not as nice as before where it just stacked on the left side, but with the new design it wanted to show me one of the chat box or utility at-a-glance views like my Calendar, but not both. Now I get both again, at the inexpensive cost of horizontal screen estate.

I do not like the new redesign, and will have to implement these tips just to make it a little more usable. I wish Google wouldn't do sucky things like this. Also Googe seems to have the worst branding. Google+, really? You think that's more alluring than Facebook? Also, rebranding the android app marketplace as "Google Play"? That's just terrible.

I find it hard google took away customizing the theme. The classic theme 'Tree' is the only one that I feel a little good about.

I'd also add a tip to check out the Minimalist Suite <a href="http://minimalistsuite.com" rel="nofollow">http://minimalistsuite.com</a> - It's Chrome extension for Gmail as well as other Google properties that allows you to customize the UI and remove of things you don't use. There are many that do this but this is the best IMHO.

I've always been using the Candy theme, and I like much better the way it looks with the new design. It's quite girly though, which unfortunately might exclude most of HN readers. But I agree that anything other than the compact display density option makes the experience much worse.

The android theme is quite good, better than the old one imo. Otherwise, I love the text label.

Just use thunderbird if you're on a desktop or laptop (ie. not an ios or android device, although I'm sure they have equivalents).<p>I recommend installing muttator, the equivalent of vimperator for thunderbird. It will make the time you spend with email much more efficient.

Sadly for me I dislike the High contrast theme as much as the new default one.

I'm using Google Apps and the "high contrast" theme is missing from the list.

Let me scroll the damn page and not just a viewport!!!<p>That's my only complain. Had to get it out of my chest. Move on.

Wow, tremendously better. I wasn't even aware of some of these like text for the buttons!

This reminds me of when people complained about the new facebook design.

I "coped" with it by switching to sparrow as my gmail frontend.

I don't like change.<p>That said, any browser-based alternatives?

This is more like a "how to revert to 2006 GMail" list.<p>I mean, he even goes out of his way to turn off Priority Inbox and important markers. That has nothing to do with the redesign - it's just turning off year+ old features, which is what a good portion of the post is. Luckily for the author, options exist to turn off all the features that have been released in the past many years.<p>Of course, there's some apportioning of valid and invalid frustration with any redesign, and I won't invalidate any of that here. But this post just comes off as "make all the scary new stuff go away!"

how can that theme be high contrast? it goes from black on white to black on gray!