'A Fresh, Clean Look.' Gmail Is About To Get a Makeover (fortune.com) 149
Google says it is working on a big refresh for Gmail on the web. From a report: The upgrade was revealed in a message from Google to administrators of G Suite accounts -- G Suite being the suite of Google services that organizations can use on their own web domains, rather than Google's. The message stated that the changes would be coming to consumer Gmail accounts, as well as G Suite accounts. Google said the refresh would include not only a "fresh, clean look for Gmail on the web," but also easy ways to access other Google services, such as Google Calendar, from the Gmail web app. The company recently started winding down its Chrome apps for all platforms but Google's own Chrome OS. Windows, Mac and Linux users are now being encouraged to instead use Google's web apps, and it's only logical that those interfaces are now getting upgraded to include the functionality that would otherwise be lost. The Verge has screenshots of the new interface.
What the fuck. No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone have a different/better free email service.
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The screenshots all have two mails in the inbox, so it's hard to tell how well mails are separated in the list.
I hope they include a dark mode. I turn down the brightness and contrast on my monitors anyway, I don't need a bright light shining in my face all day.
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I don't see 3d beyond the floating button and those terrible cards. I always have issues on what is selectable or not.
It might be clean looking, but it is not elegant. Everything is way to large.
Re: What the fuck. No! (Score:1)
Whee, now the text is too small. The gripe is the 50px border around everything, not the font size. I understand that border is to make it easier to use on a touchscreen, but it only translates into wasting more of my screen to do less on my desktop with a keyboard and mouse.
Re:What the fuck. No! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't have a major problem with it if I could understand the purpose, and if they would stop removing features.
I don't understand the purpose of a phone-friendly gmail web page when they have gmail apps everywhere.
One example of a removed feature is when they revamped the Google Voice webpage, they removed quite a few things - but most notably for me was the ability to email voicemail messages... this was useful to me because our home phone uses Google Voice and I could send my wife's messages to her.
In general, the information content is far lower with the redesign. Good for phones, where I don't use it. Bad for desktops/laptops with high-res monitors.
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Just when you thought you knew where everything was. Time to windows 8 the interface.
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No one but you wants this refresh
I do/don't want X, therefore everyone does/doesn't want X!
Everyone thinks like I do and if they don't they are in the wrong!
Re:What the fuck. No! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, Material Design doesn't solve any problems for me. Gmail is an app that displays a lot of information, and as near as I can tell, designers HATE having more than one piece of information on the screen at a time. I worked for an enterprise software development company and our designer kept trying to push our app from being an information rich, wonderful app for IT staff, to this Uber-inspired single-use, single datapoint dashboard. It's been a continuous disaster and the company largely failed due to the design team's insistence on transforming the application in to the single-use java app that designers apparently train for in school.
I get that many users can't concentrate on a lot of data, but gmail is well laid out and doesn't need a change. Microsoft effectively nailed the email client workflow back in Outlook Express 3 and everyone has been using that template since Windows 3.1. I see no reason to change it at this point. A lot of design gets made/created, it seems, simply because designers need to validate their job(s) at the company. There are a lot of badly designed apps out there, but gmail is not one of them.
Google News website is another good example of the design team running roughshod over an amazing data spigot with all sorts of levers and buttons hidden just under the surface, and ripping all that out turning it in to a dumb cell phone app that you are allowed to access from your PC.
Google's design team needs to work on supporting emerging apps, not redesigning the successful ones. Google's webapps such as gmail are successful almost entirely due to their existing design.
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Displaying lots of information in a sensible way is hard work. And it's the sort of hard work that most UX designers are not equipped to handle. Just because UX design is one discipline of visual communication does not automatically lead to other disciplines like data visualization, at least not without further training.
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Philistine! Even one is clutter.
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I don't know German but I was able to go through the site and find and compare some of the services. But when I tried to sign up for a free trial of ProMail the redirect didn't work (same goes for the FreeMail sign up). And I don't know enough German to work around it, other than maybe my browser is blocking some cookies from known ad websites.
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Nobody wanted Inbox, then? (Score:1)
Anyone here use Inbox?
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Yes. Works well for me, and is more useful than GMail on Android.
Web version, meh.
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Found out about it because of your comment. Looks like an unholy mess... I'll have to play with it.
User control (Score:4, Interesting)
"Google is implementing smart replies for Gmail on the web, the same feature from mobile Gmail that provides suggestions to quickly reply to emails."
I don't like that but if is easy to switch off I could live with it.
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How hard would you say you were looking if you didn't look in Settings?
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I tend to only read and delete messages with the phone apps. So this was more of annoying feature than one getting in my way.
Do the composing on the web version.
Web apps dont work (Score:1, Funny)
Web apps never function properly unless I connect to the internet. How useless is that? I have to shut down my application whenever my mom needs to use the phone.
Plus I like to use my own computer and storage instead of googles.
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Yes, but email only needs to connect for a few seconds.
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Email is perfectly fine as asynchronous if you have a good caching client.
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GMail Offline works just fine for me, you only need to be connected to the internet every once in a while.
also, speaking of redesigns, I kinda prefer GMail Offline's to the online one. apparently they had to come up with a third one :)
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Web apps never function properly unless I connect to the internet. How useless is that? I have to shut down my application whenever my mom needs to use the phone.
Heh, that made me nostalgic of the 1990's. My great-aunt yelling at me to end the call as somebody might be trying to call us. Almost all my Internet-ing being by e-mail because of that. And my quick connects through the day to send and receive POP3 emails with Pegasus Mail. Good times! (Not really, but hindsight-fueled nostalgia makes them feel so.)
Knowing them (Score:3, Insightful)
I sure can't wait for an oversized design full of useless whitespace, flat design and no affordances with 50% of the content hidden.
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Re:Knowing them (Score:5, Insightful)
You left out the use of low contrast colors including, but not limited to, light blue on a white background and the even less readable white on light blue..
In any case, it's a moot point. Despite having DSL fast enough to support 3 TVs streaming different programming simultaneously, gmail and Google docs are so slow and clunky from my location that I long since set up IMAP and POP interfaces for my gmail.
Oh, no! another fresh flat look! (Score:5, Insightful)
Using wordless icons makes sense in a 5 inch mobile screen. Here I have two 24 inch full def screens, and I need to guess "will this create a new message? or this? Or will it reply all? Where is that stupid gear icon? Oh, they changed it to ham-sandwich. Now ham-sandwich is gone and we got kebab. There is a + in a circle. Or sometimes there is a pencil. "
There is no clear demarkation of where the clickable area ends. There is no delineation of clickable areas. Who designs these swipe gestures? swipe up down left right pinch and expand roll ....
They will not rest till we all spend all our days learning new GUI every day.
Re:Oh, no! another fresh flat look! (Score:5, Funny)
There is a reason why the unemployment rate is hovering around historical lows.
They're taking everyone who couldn't hold a normal job and turning them into web developers.
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You're not their intended audience. My guess is that their intended audience is the larger mass of users who primarily use a 5 inch mobile screen and see these types of upgrades as a form of entertainment. Small screen productivity tools is something of an oxymoron.
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Why these guys casually change the look and feel without worrying about users?
This is the funny one. You assume this isn't driven by the absolutely insane amount of data that Google collects on users.
It's like the people blowing their top everytime their favourite feature in Windows disappears while at the same time complaining about telemetry. Well guess what, if only the dumb people turn on telemetry and only the dumb people use computers in a dumb way, expect your software to be dumber with the next update.
Don't you ever wonder why (Score:3)
If it does it's for the worse, seems it's just a modern curse
--Oingo Boingo
Don't touch plain HTML client please (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Google,
Please don't touch the plain HTML web client.
It's the one part of Gmail which is fast and efficient and doesn't need Javascript.
Thanks. (Signed, a guy who just wants to send email without having to fight a "modern" UI.)
Re: Don't touch plain HTML client please (Score:1)
+1
Get off our lawns.
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Let's hope that redesign team doesn't even remember about basic Html version.
Re: Don't touch plain HTML client please (Score:2)
Yes. Keep the lightweight plain HTML version! It's a godsend when I'm stuck using a slow computer or cruddy public wifi.
Are they going to fix focus on the [Send] button? (Score:3)
While composing if you press TAB then the [Send] button will get focus which is to be expected.
Except Gmail has this annoying "feature/bug" that it does NOT colorize the [Send] button with a different background color -- except with a thin dotted rectangle that is bloody hard to see. It is too easy to then press Enter thinking you are going to indent the current line except you accidently fire off the email. Thank God for the Undo at the top.
Since Google still doesn't understand good UI here is a console snippet that will color-code the [Send] button red when it has focus.
for( var i = 0; i < document.styleSheets.length; i++ )
for( var j = 0; j < document.styleSheets[i].cssRules.length; j++ )
if( document.styleSheets[i].cssRules[j].selectorText === ".T-I-atl:focus" )
document.styleSheets[i].cssRules[j].style.backgroundImage = "-webkit-linear-gradient(top,#F48,#F00)";
WTF is Gmail being re-designed when they don't even understand _basic_ UI ?
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Its the same with Apple and M$ at the least. Lets shiny up are stuff without fixing it. The users won't know and we will get paid.
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Why the F is the class for the Send button named .T-I-atl, that is the question.
I will welcome any Gmail redesign that will rename classes to readable, understandable English words accurately reflecting their functions.
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I don't think you need to prefix "-webkit-" on linear gradients anymore.
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WTF is Gmail being re-designed when they don't even understand _basic_ UI ?
Is this a trick question?
Hope it's better than Google Finance makeover! (Score:4, Interesting)
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The calendar too. I used to be able to add events like "meeting tomorrow at 2PM" with natural language, now I have to fill in a form.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It should have been a clear indication that if you search for finance and news on stocks that Yahoo is the first result and Google is the second and always has been. Google... the company that was slapped by the EU regulator for promoting itself, didn't promote its own finance app.
Outlook Lite (Score:2)
No No No!! Do not want! (Score:5, Insightful)
The jack offs already ruined calendar, now they're ruining Gmail?
Change for the sake of change. I hate it! Silicon valley and it's adhd on design changes ffs. Let it go! If it ain't broke don't fix it.
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I used to be able to add events in the calendar using natural language, like "meeting tomorrow at 2" now I have to fill in a freaking form! Idiots! And this comes from a company that is presumably pushing AI...
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Type it into a regular Google search instead of the new event form and it works fine.
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They have to ruin it so we can be ready for them to "fix it" using AMP.
Just like Classic Coke came after New Coke, but really, wasn't the same at all.
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Change for the sake of change.
Nope. Change for sake of bottom line. No one spends money on changes like this if all it did was create change. The reality is that stale interfaces reflect poorly on the bottom line. Pissing a few people off in the interest of remaining "fresh" actually promotes business ... unless you're Snapchat, they fucked that up royally.
Well, fuck. (Score:2)
Anyone knows a freemail provider I could move to?
Re:Well, fuck. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well, fuck. (Score:5, Funny)
If you're looking to try something different, I hear good things about GMail.
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stop the ridiculousness (Score:2)
In this case Google's designers have gone crazy. I am absolutely incensed with them for rolling out this ridiculous tile-laden, cluttered redesign of Google Flights, for example: https://www.google.com/flights [google.com]
when the old version was clean, f
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It's probably more generational than you realize. What is easy to parse visually is whichever is in the more familiar style. If you primarily use other apps designed in a similar way, then a redesign in that style will make whatever you're using more parse-able.
I'm early millennial and I've never really used Google Flights. When looking at both, I think the first one is much easier to understand, even if the more advanced features aren't available until after you search. Think about the "save icon" as a
Ah yes, the classic "makeover." (Score:2, Interesting)
Over they ears we have learned that software hits its functionality high point... but the company still employs people who are supposed to make it better.
After the high point all they can do is make it worse. It is like paying cooks to make cookies and after they have the perfect dough, you tell them to keep adding ingredients. "Dog ownership is trending right now so please add stuff that is dog related to the dough.", "DIY bathroom fixes are trending right now so please add something toilet related to the
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People who use Microsoft software in a more complex ways also tend to turn off all the tracking and do not send bug reports. So Microsoft gets all the tracking from people who do simple stuff and bug reports about things from the vast majority of people who do simple stuff. I have no clue how they take this to mean making the simple stuff accessible and hiding away the more complex features and more complex things don't quite work as expected... or at all would escape them...
Function following form (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking "designers" are getting way too full of themselves. Look, I grant that good industrial design is a hugely useful and can add a lot of value to a product. But WAY too many products these days (software especially) have changes for the sake of changes so designers can collect a paycheck and keep busy. My smartphone has WAY too many applications with needlessly obtuse interface decision because the "designer" thought they looked cool or wanted things to be needlessly minimalistic. It's function following form when it should be the other way around.
It seems pretty clear that usability testing is no longer a thing in software interface design. I am SO tired of incomprehensible icons, unintuitive gestures, blind navigation spaces, hidden design elements, lack of written labels, inconsistent interfaces, and needless changes to perfectly functional software. I hate web pages that put information that should fit on one screen in a huge page forcing me to scroll endlessly over needlessly large graphics that convey little information. (Apple I'm look at you here)
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This is why I've used Netscape for the last 20 years. I've grown accustomed to its face, while everyone plays *follow the leader*... over the cliff as far as I care.
Blah (Score:1)
I hate it when companies spin dumbing down as cleaning up.
fresh clean look? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fresh and Clean look == More white space, new icons with no labels, no clear clickable areas, flat blue on white color scheme you can't change.....
I fuckin hate this new flat shit
They need real work to keep from getting bored. (Score:1)
Fuck Webmail! (Score:5, Interesting)
To hell with that. I use Thunderbird, and for good reason. It's one extra measure of control for me, one less for Google.
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I'm not sure which bugs me more, the fact that Thunderbird, clunky as it feels, is better than Web gmail, or the fact that I expect this "upgrade" to make web gmail even worse.
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Fuck gui clients... (Score:2)
To hell with that. I use alpine and fetchmail, and for good reason. It's one extra measure of control for me. And it's just as fast as it's always been.
What for? (Score:5, Insightful)
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What makes you think you will be able to do the same things?
They monitor what features most (dumb) users uses. If they don't use something, it must be clutter an goes.
I expect them to remove Labels.
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I resent this penchant for GUI makeovers just for the sake of it.
As I said elsewhere, nothing is just for the sake of it. It's to prevent appearing stale which in turn affects the bottom line. You may not like it but the ultimate fact is that a redesign is required to boost up use in any platform. Piss off a few people in return for new and returning customers is just part of a product technology lifecycle.
Duh (Score:1)
Google wants more of your data! (Score:2)
"The new Gmail We intercept even more of your personal data."
Comment (Score:2)
If they are going to make gmail as slow as their recently redesigned Calendar, I will be mad. I hate the slower calendar web page. It was better before. I really need to accelerate setting up my own groupware server. Any ideas for which open source projects I should try?
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If you find decent groupware that isn't Exchange, please write up an article about it. I feel gross using AD and Exchange in a mostly-Mac shop.
It was like that when I got here!
Bots in the firehose!! Betcha they're Russian! (Score:2)
Malibu Stacy has a New Hat!
How else could crap like this get voted up to the front page?! Somebody! Please! Tell me!
Bad user interface (Score:2)
Any user interface that changes is automatically bad in my opinion. Innovation is a barrier to us mundane computer users that want to do a few basic tasks then move on with our life.
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Facebook no, Google yes? (Score:2)
No look? (Score:2)
Ug- "clean" (Score:2)
Every time Google "improves" one of their products with a UI, it typically ends up:
1) Removing useful features
2) Reducing user customization
3) Hiding other features
4) Replacing things with stupid icons that mean nothing
5) Generally making things non-intuitive
6) Includes no help or manual
7) Adding more "social" sh** that I don't want and can't remove
I don't know about the typical user, but don't want "clean", I want "useful", "customization", and "powerful."
Oh, and it is not just Google, either...
Will this issue be fixed? (Score:1)
Will the issue of getting OTHER peoples emails in my Gmail inbox be fixed? If not, I still won't take them seriously as a useful service. It's for that reason I'd never trust them with sensitive emails. No telling WHO would get my email. This NEVER happens with the other two services I use, ONLY Gmail. Their algorithm is seriously borked.
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They made a change to this a few months ago, presumably to try to get in front of it.
AdWords used to be very upfront about being able to target people based on the content of their messages, sent and received. The last change made it so you can only target them based on the same interest / demographic / whatever buckets as the rest of AdWords.
You can be sure they still read and catalog all of your messages, but advertisers can't target you directly on it. They just use it behind the scenes to bucket you.
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Start by ditching Gmail for an alternative like ProtonMail or StartMail, and ditching Google search for DuckDuckGo or StartPage.
DuckDuckGo will have to improve VERY significantly if it is to be reckoned with as a serious alternative to Google. I am sorry to say so, but it is the truth, as my experience moving to DuckDuckGo by default a few weeks ago unambiguously and painfully proved. With ProtonMail you are just substituting a Big Brother for another. I have no experience with StartPage and StartMail; I'll look into them.
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That might be a good idea until you somehow manage to get on any of the spam watchdog's lists. Then try, as a "normal" server, to get off it again so your mail actually gets delivered.
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It's intrinsically insecure based on the way it was designed 30+ years ago. Securing e-mail would require a wholesale reprogramming of the entire protocol.
No, and no.
Evidence to the contrary. Good security was added to the email standard in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880>RFC, without "wholesale reprogramming of the entire protocol" as you put it. In point of fact I have been using this for many years and it works excellently.
All that's necessary is for people to use it. Local clients support it. Of course surveillance company products like gmail will be reluctant but that is exactly WHY you don't want to let them control the worldwide email system
Re:THIS SUCKS (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you'll fit right in here. You should get an account and sign in.
Welcome.
Re: THIS SUCKS (Score:1)
What's wrong with it? It looks like the biggest changes are little appearance things like replacing some sharp corners with smooth curves. I'm fine with this so long as they keep "compact" view and don't force super spaced out touchscreen layouts on desktop.
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It's a deal. I don't have to hassle with running a mail server, they get to collect as much worthless information on me as they desire. If they can find a customer for the data and refrain from doing stupid (and illegal) things like harvesting and selling my credit card informaiton, more power to them.