The self-righteous anger about the irredeemable horror of the new Gmail compose is starting to get a bit old.
First of all, it's not as one-sided as people are making it out. I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits. Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).
There are some important philosophical reasons behind some of these changes that I strongly agree with:
First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good. The OA seems to glorify long-winded CEO screeds, but by definition the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they're not I don't want to work with you), so it's correct to optimize for the short case. The two levels of pop-out (the second of which the OA appears to be completely ignorant of) scale up and out quite nicely.
Second, the hidden headers and formatting options are encouraging simplicity in email. Most email should not have formatting, and arguably most emails don't have CCs, BCCs, or edited subjects either. Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out. It takes a little while to get used to and then you just subconsciously do the double click, it's not really any harder than finding them in a sea of icons, it's just that previously you were used to that sea of options. The optimization for the common case is done correctly.
For me the new design (after turning on compact view) is a moderate improvement that did nothing to dilute the core value of Gmail which are the labels, keyboard shortcuts/navigation, conversation view and search/filters. Running it inside Mailplane makes it even better.
There are definitely annoyances, but nothing that's even close to driving me to something like mutt, and forget about GUI clients, all of them feel like molasses compared to Gmail.
Nice pith, but how about adding some meat to that rebuttal.
> "Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short."
The topic at hand is power emailing. Not people who write a message to their family once a week as the majority of their email.
> Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and furiously tweeting this sentence.
I don't even know where you get this. Having a minimal interface with the most used features present and others grouped under menus of some sort is an age-old proven UI convention. This is the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of Microsoft software or other bloated programs with toolbars and ribbons bursting at the seams. Citing Microsoft is just a way for you to justify your emotional reaction to my comment without adding any substance.
> "The topic at hand is power emailing. Not people who write a message to their family once a week as the majority of their email."
That use-case is completely valid. Unless you're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with. Optimising for something that doesn't suit the majority of users is usually a mistake.
I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me. There's nothing about Gmail that prevents that use case. I just responded because it's a stupid example.
> Unless you're going to argue that GMail is meant to be a'power emailing' tool, which I'd disagree with.
Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers.
But that's neither here nor there because obviously they are trying to improve it for the most common case which is the source of the much-reviled changes.
It's not normal people that are complaining about these changes. It's entrenched power emailers who had their workflow thrown off by change and whose muscle memory is leading them to believe that this redesign is a disaster. New users won't have any worse experience than they did before, I guarantee you that.
> "I'm sorry, your message makes no sense to me..."
I'm trying to point out that the topic is wider than power emailing as these feature changes affect everyone. You don't get to choose which ones to adopt.
> "Okay, so first of all, yes Google was in fact invented to be a power email tool because it was built by engineers for engineers. ... obviously they are trying to improve it for the most common case"
It doesn't follow that Gmail was 'invented to be a power email tool'. Also, there's an assumption in there they're genuinely trying to improve for the common case. It could also be a range of internal pressures forcing changes that are actually detrimental for users. Companies fuck up like this all the time, so let's not pretend that Google is somehow exempt from that class of big-company-mistake.
> I'm trying to point out that the topic is wider than power emailing as these feature changes affect everyone. You don't get to choose which ones to adopt.
And I'm arguing that Gmail's design decisions are made with a solid basis in the widest common use case despite all the self-righteous nerdrage piled upon the tired mantra that Google is horrible at design.
> It doesn't follow that Gmail was 'invented to be a power email tool'.
What do you mean it "doesn't follow"? I'm not justifying this as a logical argument, I'm repeating statements I've read from Gmail's creators in interviews over the years.
What exactly does "power emailing" mean to you? Is it the ability to send a lot of short emails quickly? Is it the ability to email while seeing emails come in?
From my perspective the new compose modal window removes power from the user. Instead of having all of the formatting tools and options open and ready to go, you've got to expand the window the see them. You've got less screen real estate to work with and even on the reply window you have to click on the formatting icon to get the formatting tools even though there is plenty of room to just show the tools in the first place.
Making users click more to complete a task is not bad if there is a good reason to do so. Forcing users to click more because you hid important functionality to save room that is not used for something else doesn't make sense. You've added load to the task for virtually no gain.
I guess if short, rapid fire emails are the primary mode of usage for a user the new compose UI works great. I'd imagine the vast majority of gmail users do not send a high volume of emails per day, and the old compose UI worked fine while surfacing all of the functionality they needed.
> Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload
If only someone had invented a windowing GUI.
My main issues, now I've set the default to fullish screen, is it's more like Outlook: editing the To/CC fields is annoying, and it wants you to always quote the entire email.
I await a Chrome extension to let me live in the past with people who knew how to use computers.
At work I have to use a mac, it's a PITA to manage multiple non fullscreen windows on it. There is also a fair amount of screen estate lost per window.
Same with Windows, and Linux as they just copy Windows/Mac GUIs and never bother to finish them off. The problem is Raise-on-click, means you can USE overlapping windows, and drag and drop breaks. My theory is all GUIs are fundamentally stuck in the year they were first designed, so 1983 or so for Windows/Mac. Full screen, almost single tasking. RISC OS, being designed in 1986, is better, as a GUI.
Whoa whoa whoa. short by definition ? I use email to you know write to people if I want short I can text or chat or tweet or smoke signal. I rather assume email is long by definition.
You have so many assumptions in this response that I'm quite sure you don't know what you're saying. My organization is not a little tech startup with everyone sitting in a room. We have editors, translators, acquisitions, materials, marketing folks, etc. We have part time, full time, contractors, volunteers. We have people in over 20 countries, some working from home, some from offices, some from coffee shops. Most of them use Macs, some of them PCs, at least one person runs Linux.
Email is the universal medium. If I need to search for some history, I start with email since it is the most common. Skype we use for private and urgent chat. Campfire we use for general development chat. Basecamp we use for archivable product decision making. All of those have their uses.
I can't begin to think why you believe all my short emails are better suited for chat, but without context it's extremely, extremely ignorant and wrong.
> I can't begin to think why you believe all my short emails are better suited for chat, but without context it's extremely, extremely ignorant and wrong.
I can't begin to think why you think I've even suggested chat, but hey, jump to your conclusions.
All that remains is for me to thank you for being a patronising bastard, and leave it there.
> Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win
It was possible to do this before the changes rolled out. Shift-compose opened it (still does) in a new window, and you could work with it and your mailbox side-by-side.
> the small window by default encourages short emails... the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they're not I don't want to work with you)
Agreed, write enough emails and you eventually learn that you're on borrowed time beyond the first half sentence.
Browsing email while composing isn't part of my workflow. Definitely makes sense as a use case, a few others mentioned it as well.
Agreed, for short emails (setting up mtgs, quick reviews) it works fine for the most part.
Personal preference wise - I feel more comfortable sending email when I'm able to see CC/BCC, text formatting, & attachments. Understand that not everyone feels the same way.
If email has to be short in your company, then why don't you just use twitter. Those 140 character limit should clearly help you and your employees to express better.
In the meantime, please leave alone people that use email to actually write something and go back to twitter and the likes.
First of all, it's not as one-sided as people are making it out. I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits. Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).
There are some important philosophical reasons behind some of these changes that I strongly agree with:
First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good. The OA seems to glorify long-winded CEO screeds, but by definition the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they're not I don't want to work with you), so it's correct to optimize for the short case. The two levels of pop-out (the second of which the OA appears to be completely ignorant of) scale up and out quite nicely.
Second, the hidden headers and formatting options are encouraging simplicity in email. Most email should not have formatting, and arguably most emails don't have CCs, BCCs, or edited subjects either. Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out. It takes a little while to get used to and then you just subconsciously do the double click, it's not really any harder than finding them in a sea of icons, it's just that previously you were used to that sea of options. The optimization for the common case is done correctly.
For me the new design (after turning on compact view) is a moderate improvement that did nothing to dilute the core value of Gmail which are the labels, keyboard shortcuts/navigation, conversation view and search/filters. Running it inside Mailplane makes it even better.
There are definitely annoyances, but nothing that's even close to driving me to something like mutt, and forget about GUI clients, all of them feel like molasses compared to Gmail.