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Google Technology

Former Gmail Design Lead and Cofounder of Inbox Releases a Free Chrome Extension To Simplify Gmail Interface (fastcompany.com) 71

An anonymous reader shares a report: Michael Leggett is even more annoyed with Gmail than you are. "It's like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen," he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It's true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive -- and at least half a dozen notifications -- all clutter Gmail at any given moment. And of course, there's that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago. "Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left," rants Leggett. "C'mon. It's pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break."

Rather than sit there and stew, Leggett decided to do something about it: He created a free Chrome extension called Simplify, where all the extraneous folders and functions overloading Gmail seem to melt away, leaving you with a calm screen and nothing but your messages. It's understatedly beautiful, and every button just seems like it's in the right place. In fact, it feels a little too good for some random free Chrome extension made by some random developer. Let's just say that Leggett was highly qualified for the job. You see, Leggett was actually the lead designer for Gmail from 2008 to 2012. He also cofounded the since-discontinued Inbox, which attempted to reimagine Gmail for the modern era.

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Former Gmail Design Lead and Cofounder of Inbox Releases a Free Chrome Extension To Simplify Gmail Interface

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  • Here is an idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 26, 2019 @10:31AM (#58495962)

    Use a real email client instead of this web-based crap. Problem solved.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You mean, where you can create FOLDERS too?!?!

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Do you think such a tool would make it possible to manage several email addresses on a single screen ? With folders, filters and no ads ? That would be awesome.

    • Re:Here is an idea (Score:4, Informative)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @11:38AM (#58496426)

      yes, been using Thunderbird for over ten years now, works great, less filling.

    • by twms2h ( 473383 )

      I actually like a web based email client. And unfortunately GMail still seems to be the best there is. That doesn't mean that is is perfect though. It has gained a lot of "features" over the years that I strongly dislike.

      But OTOH desktop email clients are also far from great. I am using Thunderbird because it is the best I could find, but again, it's far from being good. It has improved again a bit lately after several years of becoming worse with each update.

  • HTML Interface (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hduff ( 570443 ) <hoytduff@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Friday April 26, 2019 @10:38AM (#58496020) Homepage Journal

    I use the HTML interface for Gmail and like it's simplicity and lack of clutter.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I use the thunderbird interface, much better.

    • I use the HTML interface for Gmail and like it's simplicity and lack of clutter.

      Yeah. I read :

      Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago

      and thought "3 seconds? Really? It takes my browser a full 15 seconds for gmail to load with all the bells and whistles turned on!"

  • Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @10:41AM (#58496046)

    My Gmail screen doesn't look like his 'before' example. Maybe I've just turned off most of the annoying features - but I sure didn't require a plugin to achieve a clean screen (unless AdBlock Plus is cleaning it up for me). Acutally, I just clicked on the 'hangouts' icon at the bottom left, and now I have a signin prompt I can't get rid of. Oh well, it was clean before that... ;-)

    • Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @10:49AM (#58496118)

      Oh, wait. I can go to settings-chat-hide, and remove that whole section. So, this guy is what? Creating a plug-in to turn off features that you can already disable in Settings? Brilliant! I guess he hopes to turn his "I worked on Gmail" cred into a new business selling plugins. Or giving away plugins that spy on you. Or maybe, he's just providing a free plugin out of the goodness of his heard - but then, why not just post instructions on how to configure Gmail and let people configure it to their liking...

      • I think this is actually meant to draw attention to the company that he works for now. From the article:

        "landing at Nori, a company addressing climate change with blockchain"

        I laughed out loud when I read that line. The link leads to another FC article about Nori.

    • Same here, and I definately prefer it to the ultra-minimalist thing he's done with it. I can read my emails without getting distracted by that tiny logo up top, thanks!
  • It's called... IMAP(S).

    Unfortunately it need a brain to operate, and apparently they're all out nowadays.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    they should apply the same thing, remove the ads on both side and flashing stuff, use the width of the page for the article and they would have a much less cluttered design... but some people don't do what they preach...

  • Whitespace. Lots of it. Forgive my ignorance but I don't want to dedicate >23% of my screen to empty nothingness. No really, I used a measuring tape.

    Maybe it's my Gmail theme but the logo takes 1% of the screen, the search box 8%, the navigation 11%, and the actual email list (in "comfortable" mode) 74%. I'm okay with that. In fairness I keep the tab fullscreen on a dedicated monitor so maybe my use case isn't the target?

    • by TWX ( 665546 )

      That was my experience just now too. I'd already set a bunch of the interface options, and on a 1920 by 1200 screen I had an awful lot of whitespace, distractingly so.

      There are a few more colorful buttons on the conventional compact view than I'd like but they're less distracting than huge whitespace columns.

  • I mean.. Sure convenience is a thing but if you kinda care about what Google do whatsoever why not run Firefox? Like I do. But then how to use the extension? =P

  • Love it !! Thank you !!!
  • by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @11:13AM (#58496288)

    Ever since the new improved Gmail interface last year it's been dog slow compared to the original design.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Same with youtube and a number of other google domains. Every site uses this horrible 'late loading' paradigm where they first render a bunch of grey filler elements before rendering the actual elements because...they don't want to show a partially rendered page I guess? I don't know why, but it makes their properties pointlessly slow, painfully in some cases.

      It reminds me of a time I wrote a loading screen for a small game back in the early 2000's. After doing some testing I realized that the loading sc

  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @11:29AM (#58496376)
    If you look at the before and after screenshot [fastcompany.net] in TFA, it looks like all it does is cover up the extraneous elements with white. The active area isn't any bigger, and in fact appears to be smaller.
    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      I would argue that over simplification (mobilfication) is also one of the biggest problems in user interface trends, maybe people should stop listening to designers instead of people who actually use the application.
    • by jwdb ( 526327 )

      If you look at the before and after screenshot in TFA, it looks like all it does is cover up the extraneous elements with white. The active area isn't any bigger, and in fact appears to be smaller.

      However, if you were to actually try downloading and using it, as I have done, you'd see that the extraneous elements are indeed removed, not just covered up. The reason it doesn't look that way is because he sets a maximum width on the list of messages, so if you make your window too wide it'll end up with white

  • a couple of points (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @11:30AM (#58496378) Journal

    1) in fact, all it seems to do is MASK those graphical annoyances, it just leaves empty space behind? So how useful is that? I mean, yes, if the giant GMAIL logo offends thee, let it be struck from thine sight! But utilitywise, this is pretty pointless. For example, the text of the email that's shown in a single line preview is still constrained by those invisible graphic elements (now it's just empty screen, instead of stretching the lines to show more information).

    2) I can just see the /. story tomorrow: malicious former gmail programmer infects 18million machines in 20 minutes with clever gmail plugin ruse masking keylogger and rootkits.

  • by Akardam ( 186995 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @11:32AM (#58496392)

    I find it at least a bit ironic that an article about simplifying an interface and getting rid of unnecessary clutter and garbage is hosted on a site that feels it necessary to load a bunch of javascript (and likely other things) from 10+ other domains...

  • I see this designer also happens to be one of the google employees who's obsessed with whitespace. Google's obsession with padding everything with massive whitespace is what got me to stop using half of their products and switch from google music to someone else.
  • Fails miserably at 4k 16:9, just loads of unused space and actually feels less useful.
  • by zarmanto ( 884704 ) on Friday April 26, 2019 @12:04PM (#58496574) Journal

    "Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left," rants Leggett. "C'mon. It's pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break."

    (Sigh.)

    <soapbox>
    So, the first thing wrong with this rant is that Gmail isn't actually a desktop app... it's a web-app. Upon reading that line, I promptly toggled through the dozen or so web-apps that I use most frequently; all of them have site-logos in that exact same spot. Every. Last. One. (To add insult to injury, most of them are actually bigger than the Gmail logo.)

    Mind you, I'm by no means suggesting that Gmail is perfect; certainly I've levied my fair share of complaints against changes to which I objected myself over the years -- and of course, it has frequently felt to me like those complaints were met with deaf ears, so there may be a decent amount of ego at play on the Gmail development team... but I would opine that Leggett chose the wrong whipping boy for his curse laden spiel. Surely he could have found something less obviously common on which to focus his ire?

    Or, ya know, another really neat idea might be to take the high road, and skip the curses and insults entirely. It's not like they add to the discussion, after all.
    </soapbox>

  • This is freaking google. They have 10's of thousands of the smartest people in the world working for them. And they make an interface, purpose of reading bloody email... and it is a total /mess/ Just look at it. TWELVE different types of buttons. !TWELVE! All color differently, with focus, mouse over, selected.... I create web apps for a living. I would not dare show this to a client. Never. I could walk though every single type of button, but I won't bore you with that. It's just that I do not get it.
  • And of course, there's that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago

    Wait, does Gmail load in 3 seconds for some people?

  • The extension might work OK for now. But as Google makes tweaks, is the extension going to be able to keep up?

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

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