GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism

It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width.<p>Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster.<p>Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be <i>very</i> reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.

There's something deeper going on here:<p>The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements being hidden or tucked away behind several clicks for the sake of "minimalism", incorrectly correlating a sterile white page with "simplicity". And they won't stop until the whole page is white and empty with one button and a line of text.<p>These designers are doing whatever makes them look off the wall bat-shit-creative (of the Lady Gaga variety). Many of these designers have stopped caring about a/b tests and the users and are focusing their designs solely on how it makes them look to the community. They want to be the next Steve Jobs, now that he has passed. And they are going to mimic his arrogance, take his risks, and think it will get them to his level. It will not, it's just pissing us off.<p>On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. Explaining to the average person why the new gmail UI is abnoxious is like explaining to the average person what's wrong with Michael Bay's films.

When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. This is one way I know that I'm a mediocre designer. Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well.<p>I feel like Google has suffered from a similar problem - the solution to every UI problem these days is minimalism. Remove borders, accents, highlights, colors. On the surface it looks clean and simple but scratch beneath that and it seems to have no soul and no reason to exist.<p>I think the same issue goes directly to functional aspects as well - the functions and features on the page should feel alive as if they are speaking to me. I should be attracted to them, immersed in them, like they've been incorporated as parts of myself - but I'm not - I can barely differentiate them from the inactive, static parts of the page. Most of Google these days feels like I am filling out an IRS tax form. At best it is boring, at worst it is aggravating.<p>I'm looking forward to when we get through this new style of design from Google.

I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes.<p>In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme:<p><a href="http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic-blue-theme" rel="nofollow">http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic...</a><p>Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing:<p><a href="http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/" rel="nofollow">http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...</a>

One of the main problems why the 'clean design' has not actually benefitted users is because of gmails feature creep. Where once I could just write and recieve mail, now, by default, I have 'stars', 'circles', 'importance markers', '+ share', 'notifications', 'gadgets'... etc. all confusing my view of my mail. Most users don't want any of these things, and they certainly don't want to have to spend mental energy realising they dont want them, then hunting around in settings menus to see if you can actually turn them off...<p>There are some good design additions in the revised gmail too, but IMHO the above is really what makes gmail feel much more cluttered and cumbersome than it was before....

Personally, I love the new GMail interface and have been using it for months. I like that is less cluttered and that I can more easily configure what is displayed. I've changed the buttons to be text in the settings as I did find the icons hard to pick at a glance. I also love the new themes.<p>It's interesting to me to see so many people grumble at interface changes whether it's Facebook or Gmail.

All of the things that he's complaining about are changeable in settings. And not even buried three levels deep -- they're right on the first settings page!<p>1. Pick a different theme. I have one with a blue background, not the default light/white one.<p>2. Go into the general settings, and change your star to a different colour, ie. enable the red, or blue one, or the green checkbox. Now they stand out.<p>3. Go into the general settings. Change the 'Button Labels' radio from 'Icons' to 'Text'.<p>If you're going to bag someone's interface, you should at least spend some time figuring out how you can change it...

I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.

I have no problem with the new Gmail. After the initial adjustment period, I find myself enjoying it more than the old version. I have developed a reflex for using the buttons that didn't exist with the text versions. It just happened.

Well at least there's a giant red COMPOSE button, because every time I see a giant red button, I think COMPOSE!<p>I'm hoping that they'll do another revision soon to make it look more like the recently updated G+ design, which actually puts some visual separation between content and navigation (and also doesn't have giant red buttons).

I, like the author, abhor the new GMail interface. Thankfully, I found a <i>workaround</i>, explained at bottom.<p>In fact, I found it difficult to explain to my parents how to navigate the new interface. They were quite upset at the changes and were considering about how to revert to their old providers (thankfully, I set up an email forwarding domain for them years ago so they can change any time they wish). It really is that appalling!<p>The contrast in usability to almost any other web mail service is shocking. Check Hotmail or Fastmail.fm or even Yahoo mail and "feel" the difference yourself!<p>Workaround to GMail's new interface:<p>0. Make sure you have a browser or plugin that supports site-selective scripting, e.g. NoScript.<p>1. Disable scripting for google.com<p>Then when you login, GMail offers a "basic html" interface. This is amazingly straightforward, fast, everything clearly delineated with strong colors, all new information extremely obvious, and just the basic design that matches closely to the old design.<p>If Google manage to mess up even this basic interface, then I guess, I and my family will have to find alternatives, e.g. switching to mail clients or for those who travel a lot to Hotmail.

Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who <i>don't</i> understand design abusing style and visual trends.<p>The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.

I hate the new themes. My question is: why couldn't they have provided themes that at least look similar to the old ones? I tried most of the available themes and there only one that I find vaguely satisfactory is the high contrast theme. Some of them, like "Wood" are laughable -- is this an old Myspace page I'm seeing? And better yet, you'd think a company with Google's talent pool could make the themes configurable at a more granular level.<p>Thanks, Google, for making me contemplate abandoning gmail for the first time. (I know, I know... it's free, right? So what right do I have to complain? I guess I'm mostly angry at myself for growing so dependent on it (and recommending it to my friends/family.))

Now, personally speaking, I don't like a bunch of the changes (those damn icons being the most annoying - and yes I know you can change them to text and I have :-). I can certainly criticise some stuff that gets in the way of my personal workflow. But hey - I'm not the 'average' GMail user. Expecting Google for optimise for me is daft.<p>A couple of random thoughts from usability tests I've done over the years:<p>* People are treating the changes to gmail in isolation. Google has changed and integrated design over all of their products. Some parts of a system can get "worse", but still help the overall system get "better". I've seen this when we culled some specialised hi-density layouts on a particular part of a larger system that pissed off some expert users who spent all their time there - but opened up the functionality to be used by a <i>much</i> larger population who were more familiar with the "normal" look.<p>* People don't know what Google is optimising for. Usability and usability testing isn't necessarily about "making things nice for the user". It's about meeting the business goal. For example I've seen users <i>hate</i> the fact we took some layout and colour preferences away from them, despite the fact that overall satisfaction went up, and efficiency increased <i>even for the users who hated the change</i>.<p>* I 100% guarantee that the people commenting here are not "normal" as far as Google is concerned. Does it matter if the geeks like me hate that they can see less e-mail at a time, if the other 99% of the market is jumping for joy that they're not repeatedly clicking on the wrong e-mail? Sometimes you just can't make everybody happy - so have to make a decision over which audience you want to be happy. You will generally have a more successful product if 60% of your audience goes "yay" rather than 100% going "meh".<p>* I spend a bunch of my time talking to "normal" users. I've noticed the general reaction to the new GMail be very different from the general reaction here. They either liked it, or just not noticed/expressed an opinion. I suspect Google cares about that user group more than it does me :-)<p>Also, and this is complete guesswork on my part, this feels like a first stage to me. Currently the various apps are very lightly integrated with a mostly pure visual design makeover. I wouldn't be surprised to see more functional integration appear over the next year or two as more people perceive the various Google apps and systems as an integral "thing".

"I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily."<p>You can remove the importance markers: Settings &#62; Inbox tab &#62; Importance Markers.

I'm incredulous that one of the goals of the redesign was to make more powerful themes. New-style themes are much, much <i>less</i> powerful than the old-style themes - cf. the new Terminal theme, which can't even change the text color or font, but is rather a hollow shell of itself with a small gif of a blinking green cursor in the upper left corner the only remnant of its old self. A preview of the old page in my Opera speed dial is all that remains of my old green-on-black monospace friend; I have set it to never update.<p>Incidentally, the new UI for video calls makes the 'end' button the same color as the background, and it is very difficult to see.

Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.

I have been using Yahoo Mail for a number of years. I find the interface to be far superior to that of GMail. More usable and practical. In many ways it mimics Outlook. They have some nice drag-and-drop action, right click menu tools and, my favorite, an Outlook-like reading pane. Last time I touched GMail it felt clunky. Because of this I have never felt compelled to use it.

Please, for the love of Loki, can we all stop equating our subjective opinions with objective truth? Your tastes are different than others. That doesn't make them "arrogant" - at least, not necessarily.

Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.

brilliant hack to re-enable reverting to the old gmail UI:<p><a href="http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail" rel="nofollow">http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail</a><p><a href="http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerjk.com$2Frevert-gmail" rel="nofollow">http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerj...</a>

The thing that drives me crazy with the new design is the separate scrolling areas, when I use the mouse wheel or hit the up/down arrow keys I want the entire thing to scroll, not whatever chunk I happen to my mouse in. This is especially annoying as I have a low res screen (old computers) and thus I can't much of any of the chat list, I used to just be able to scroll down to see it. I wish knew CSS magics to try and fix it with stylish or something (I'm a c programmer all the way)

I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone:<p>Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan.<p>On your first point though you are simply wrong.  The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter.  <p>The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface.  <p>The same is true for coloured backgrounds.   If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity.  This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode.  Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do.<p>I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.

I've long solved the Gmail web interface issues by accessing it only via IMAP. On the rare occasions when I have to use the website or Android Gmail clients they seem so unproductive to me. I think it is an information density thing - my desktop client (Thunderbird these days) is able to do a far better job of showing me more information at once. It also has the ability to manage state a lot better than web apps so my different panes can have differing contexts.

Forcing users to relearn an interface without providing any added value makes no sense.<p>I ended up moving to Mail.app (which isn't perfect) because of the hideous in-page scrolling forced on me in the new Gmail interface.<p>Desktop experience is unbeatable; snappier interface, better performance, wider access to system resources, better integration with the OS, and you don't have to rely on the browser to be open all the time. I find this advantageous especially when composing emails.

I overwhelmingly agree as a UX guy w/the comments in this thread about the poor choices from a design perspective.<p>But since this new design rolled into beta I've found myself slowly depending on Gmail more and more vs. my desktop client.<p>I don't know why but the "lack" of proper interface design here makes it feel blazing FAST to me, which is really the #1 thing I care about when trying to keep up with a slew of email.<p>I never had that sense in the previous version.<p>Anybody else?

I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.

Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz").<p>(I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)

I'm in the same boat, and think the usability of the new interface is terrible. And the pretentiousness of the "form over function" design still makes me gag. But Chrome plugins like "Minimalist for Everything" make it almost bearable.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde...</a><p>This and similar tools let hide and modify GMail with custom CSS and Javascript. Instead of trying to convince Google to behave rationally, it's easier to try to warp the new interface into something usable. I think about half the things in the article are already covered.<p>If only I could figure out a way to get the "stars" on the same side in the message view as on the overview...

This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors<p>They completely REVERSED it!!<p>Previously:<p><i>Blue</i> - No new message<p><i>Orange</i> - New chat message<p>Now:<p><i>Blue</i> - New chat message<p><i>Black</i> - No new message<p>Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.

Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?

Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste.<p>To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.

There's nothing wrong with minimalism. Minimalism is about making things simple, but <i>knowing when to stop</i>.

I agree with #3. I have a lot of problems deciphering the icons, in the browser client and the ipad client.

The part I find interesting is that whole "minimalism" part. Simply removing stuff or add icons in favor of text buttons have nothing to do with minimalism necessarily.<p>I don't claim to be a minimalism expert, but more often than not people who talk about minimalism seems to think it's either cleaning up your house or removing stuff that "People don't really need", without figuring about what the basic needs actually are. Removing all door handles from your house doesn't make it a minimalist home.

<p><pre><code> &#62; I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers &#62; like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the &#62; navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody &#62; could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it &#62; because it was unfamiliar. </code></pre> It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar <i>belongs to this tab</i>. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing.<p>I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is <i>not</i> the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those <i>cannot</i> be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.

I just don't get this article from the sense that I have used GMail as my primary email client for the past 5 years and I their redesign didn't affect me at all. The things this author talks about seem to be more of personal preferences than actual objective thought. There has only been one thing that has ever really bugged me about GMail and it has nothing to do with the visual design. I don't like how they treat Folders and Tags as sort of the same thing. In my mind, they are two separate things. I want to organize my mail into folders, but I also want to tag them with keywords that have cross-cutting concerns (ex. folders Work or Home, but tags like Expenses that could be on emails in both folders).<p>Now, I understand that what I am talking about is sort of a personal preferences as well, but I guess my point is that I would care more about changes to functionality in GMail than small, minor visual changes like the ones this author describes. I sort of agree with their mentality that people eventually figure out the new UI and then it is no longer an issue.

I always have though GMail is subpar at best when it comes to interface. I feel no desire to justify this opinion, just my personal feelings.

Pretty horrible list IMO...<p>1) Try a different theme, it may help if it really affects you that much. But this is the only one I somewhat agree with as being possibly an issue; but nothing I really thought of when first looking at the new UI<p>2) The marker is more than far enough away to make it easy to scan through IMO. This feels far too subjective to just throw out and be like "yea this is definitely a bad change" without doing some testing first. Either way, you can disable this from settings. (Disable snippets iirc?)<p>3) This too can be disabled: go to settings and change it to text labels instead of graphical labels?<p>As much as I used to hate the new look too, I think it's improved enough since its first iteration to get out of the way and let me do my thing. Though, I still <i>REALLY</i> hate the fact that you can't click on the "Google" logo at the top left to go back to the main page for whatever application you happen to be at. I have no idea why they would remove that...

many of these issues can changed to be more old-gmail-like <a href="http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-redesign/" rel="nofollow">http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail-...</a><p>1) remove important markers 2) add labels to actions/buttons

Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble.<p>I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).

Actually they don't have much choices on dropping some specific email features to make UI better. Anyways I think it's just like MS Metro. One cannot say OMG this is cool as we say with Apple properties but people continue to use those (inferior) UIs.

As much as a I dislike the new Gmail design, I'm fine with it, why? I almost never use the Gmail site. I'm either getting my mail with Thunderbird or my tablet or phone. I almost never have a reason to do otherwise.

What I hate most is that when typing an email it is contained in a fixed size box. I can't fill my screen with my email, I have to scroll inside the box to move up and down.

My wife and I think they are optimizing for women. No empirical basis for this, it just seems like every one is aping UI elements and styles from Pinterest these days.

It's spelled "Gmail", lowercase 'm'. Source: the Gmail blog, <a href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/</a>

I feel completely opposite, if anything I think gmail should go back to being simpler and more minimalist instead of more complicated.

So no mention of the font size of this blog's content? The comments are larger than the content

The new icons remind me of visual studio's new redesign.<p>Monochrome icons, no text. Ugh, horrible to use.

What I don't like is colour as a premium feature, you pay with your social profile

thank gawd - someone needed to say that . we're all helpless with google's arm-twisting us to accept the new email-look, or going back, forcing youtube users to start using a gmail id ..

change is good in general. this change to gmail's interface is good in general. all 3 points in the article can be adjusted by changing a user setting.

I totally agree with you. Another specific change that is hard to defend is the new "..." three dots to expand hidden parts of the conversation from previous messages. It used to be text that was clear and large enough to click on. Apparently the Gmail team hasn't learned about Fitts' Law, and the new target is pretty hard to hit with a mouse.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law</a>

On an unrelated note:<p>I noticed people always complained about GMail having bad service (like me, when I couldn't open particular pieces of mail for a few days at a time).<p>How do these problems change when we become paying customers of Google? When I get a Google drive, do I get help in fixing problems? Or is that a lie I want to believe in?