This redesign of Gmail, like most of the Great Google Redesign happening in the last couple years, demonstrates to me that Google is constantly breaking one of the most basic rules about UI design: "Good Design" is not about making it pretty. "Good Design" is about making it easy to use; If you can do both, great. If you can only do the latter, then it will just have to be less pretty.
The Old Google was the latter (very usable, not beautiful).
The New Google is the former (looks visually pleasing, very unintuitive to use).
I curse every time I compose an email now in Gmail. Why have they hidden all the controls? Why is EVERYTHING one click away? Is ANYTHING gained AT ALL by HIDING all those buttons that are there to be used?
Heck, I still can't tell you how to make a hyperlink. I think you have to mouse over the hidden buttons. Or do you click on the hidden buttons? I think if you click on the hidden buttons then you end up clicking a button that's next to the "hyperlink* button, by mistake.
> Google is constantly breaking one of the most basic rules about UI design: "Good Design" is not about making it pretty. "Good Design" is about making it easy to use;
I suspect that the problem is that for established products, like gmail, "easy to use" just means "the exact way it is now": user familiarity trumping every other metric.
And I suspect there is only so many times a HCI design team can say "we ran a study and we should do nothing" before they are deemed useless. Eventually things have to be changed to preserve jobs and since the only metrics of "good design" in HCI, currently, are "ease of use" and "looks good" it usually results in something that "looks" easier than the old one through hiding (or removing) features and padding the shit out of everything.
>> Eventually things have to be changed to preserve jobs
This is a shortsighted answer. The acceptance of this as a truism is the kind of office culture that is toxic to a company's long term health. If you're user tests say, "we shouldn't change anything" then the people making the new designs are the ones who should be fired because they can't improve the interface.
As for familiarity, you wouldn't test current Gmail users against a new interface. Of course they would perform better against the old one. You'd get a group who'd never used either one and run your tests (unless you're incompetent).
you wouldn't test current Gmail users against a new interface
Why not? If you're trying to assess the impact of a new interface, surely the fact that it's going to confuse existing users is important?
You'd get a group who'd never used either one
So if this group likes the new one better, that outweighs any amount of confusion caused with existing users? That's basically what you're saying here.
If you're trying to determine which interface is "better", you'd want to rule out familiarity with one over the other. You could test familiar users as well, which might let you know things like how much hand holding will be needed to transition to a new interface, but it certainly wouldn't be useful in telling you which one was easier to use. The familiar one will almost universally be easier to use.
On your second point: I'm not saying the control group picking the new interface "outweighs any amount of confusion caused with existing users", but it certainly outweighs some.
If you're trying to determine which interface is "better", you'd want to rule out familiarity with one over the other.
You're assuming that "better" is some objective quality that is independent of the history of your product and who uses it. It's not. Part of what makes a UI "good" is that it's similar to other UIs that users already know, so it takes them less time to learn it. By this criterion, the UI you have right now is "better" than any other one, because your existing users already know it. Any metric of "better" that doesn't take that into account is, IMO, wrong.
it certainly outweighs some.
How much? Your prescription gives no way of judging that that I can see, since you explicitly ruled out considering input from existing users.
> As for familiarity, you wouldn't test current Gmail users against a new interface. Of course they would perform better against the old one. You'd get a group who'd never used either one and run your tests (unless you're incompetent).
Everyone has used email at this point except babies and tech averse grandpas, and all clients look more or less the same, i.e. like old gmail.
My primary frustrations are with things that I didn't use in their earlier incarnation. The fixed position headers in Google+ take up screen space, giving almost a sense of claustrophobia for negligible benefit. Google Groups is painfully slow, and performing an advanced search (e.g., if you wish to search a certain date range) is currently not possible. Blogspot has a loading page.
For things that I have used, there are real, identifiable problems: the instant search results break the back button. Link tracking on search results means you cannot copy an URL.
I feel that there is a definite trend towards poor UI, irrespective of the user's prior history with the products.
The Google redesign seems to be about creating a walled garden, tied together by Google Plus, Android, and aggressive highlighting of other Google services on each page.
Maybe they fear that if they don't trap the users, Facebook will. Either way, the continued high user figures at Yahoo show that it's possible. To do it, they need to stop being a search engine (to discover others content, leave the garden), and become a portal, the only web experience you'll ever need.
I think this becomes necessary because on a tablet, people use apps, and if those aps are deep enough, they may never escape them. You could make a tablet that just ran the facebook ap, an a subset of users would be happy. They need a counter trap.
To me, to them, any other GUI changes that crept in are likely incidental. Does it tie in with Google Plus? Will it work on a tablet?, Does it look like our tablet ap?, would be the primary question.
But that would lead to making their products easier to use, not harder. I'm not sure this theory is good for explaining much (besides Google being run by evil illuminati henchmen or whatever).
On the other hand, good design isn't simply making every single button and control visible on the page so nobody ever has to click more than once to use one. Good design is recognizing which features are used the most and making those one click away while hiding less used features that for most people just clutter up the interface.
"hiding less used features" Like sending an email?
I agree with everything you've written above, and unfortunately agree with you that they've nearly perfectly designed the UI to match "some population".
I firmly believe that proof of space aliens on earth will not be techno-thriller like spaceplanes in area 51 or theatrical drama like a UFO landing on the whitehouse lawn (we'd probably shoot it down anyway) but more likely we'll finally prove space aliens are among us when we properly identify the UI designers at APPL, GOOG, MSFT are all Vulcans and Orion Space Pirates which explains why normal earthlings can't make any sense out of what they're pushing to us.
The "modern" problem with UI seen over the past few years isn't conservatism, or ageism, or noob orientation, or pushing hardware tech for the sake of increased sales, the problem is the focus groups being used are composed of homeless Alpha Centaurians on LSD instead of humans, so naturally the endusers have an intense WTF moment when they're subjected to something that makes perfect sense if you have eyeballs that can see ultraviolet and seven fingers per tentacle.
Several jobs ago I worked at a place where they formally directed us to think about any written communication we generate, and if it sounds like something you'd read in a Dilbert cartoon, think it over a bit more. Modern UI designers need to implement a similar rule, if Cthulhu rises and decides to use your phone, or Vulcans land and click on your website, and they love it and feel you designed your product specifically for members of a horror mythos or space aliens, as a designer you're probably doing something wrong unless you're a hollywood sci fi prop designer.
Just tested this on my GMail. None of the tools required to send an E-mail are hidden. In fact you can do it all without even using a mouse if you have shortcuts turned on.
It seems that the same thing is happening to Youtube. There is now a 'settings' button in the bottom right of the player that I need to click first before changing the player size, video quality, or the annotations. I do not understand why they added this extra step.
I find this annoying too. Previously, it was one click to reveal a pop-up menu to change video quality, then another click to select a video setting. Essentially, two clicks.
Now it's one click to display the pop-up settings menu. Another click to reveal the video quality pop-up menu. Another click to select a video quality setting. And now that they've shoehorned all settings into one menu, you need another click to dismiss the entire settings menu. So they've gone from two clicks to four. Plus, there's the glaring inelegance of displaying a pop-up menu and then another pop-up menu within your pop-up menu.
I know Google have UX designers - I would love to know what their rationale is for their UX choices. I'm guessing, like Gmail, part of the design ethos was to "streamline" the interface or sweep away what they perceived as interface clutter. But all they've actually done is clumsily obscure features that were easier to access previously.
How is it that Google hires PHDs in HCI to design this stuff and they're still getting it wrong?
I don't think they're getting it wrong; I think they're just judging success by a different metric than you are. As other comments upthread have suggested, their success metric appears to be how many users they can keep within their walled garden. So the HCI experts aren't figuring out how to make Google's apps easier to use; they're figuring out how to make them harder to escape.
Case in point: a bunch of people in this thread have pointed out various things wrong with GMail's web UI, but nobody, as far as I can tell, has said "Screw this, I'm using a different email client." [Edit: I have now spotted one such person, but that's still effectively none in a thread with this many posters.] (For the record, I use KMail on Linux, the KDE 3 version, and I don't use GMail anyway, for reasons which go way beyond its UI.) To Google's HCI experts, that's success.
One thing I cannot stand is that google tracks links in my email. It's one thing to track links in the search results, another very different thing to track links in messages, which to me is unacceptable.
They did improve some things, like draggable tags. The search bar was a nice effort but not a good input system in the end[1]. It's a trend rotation, you gain some you lose some, they should acknowledge user rants and work on correcting things.
[1] most of the time, web based interfaces are less efficient than many COBOL screen based terminals, fragile, laggy, non-burst oriented.
The Old Google was the latter (very usable, not beautiful).
The New Google is the former (looks visually pleasing, very unintuitive to use).
I curse every time I compose an email now in Gmail. Why have they hidden all the controls? Why is EVERYTHING one click away? Is ANYTHING gained AT ALL by HIDING all those buttons that are there to be used?
Heck, I still can't tell you how to make a hyperlink. I think you have to mouse over the hidden buttons. Or do you click on the hidden buttons? I think if you click on the hidden buttons then you end up clicking a button that's next to the "hyperlink* button, by mistake.
Come on, Google.