Continuing on Gmail mistakes. Tabs on the left are, in fact, popover menus! Who could’ve thought?
The amount and layout of various buttons and dropdowns here never did and never will make sense.
Happy New Year, Gmail!
How many popups at the same time is too many? I think three is a good number.
Thanks grishka for the picture.
Let’s start our tour of new GMail redesign. My first question would be simple enough: what the fuck happened with the layout of email headers? This totally looks like broken CSS, with those huge holes and randomly aligned elements
People tend to hover the cursor on things they are interested in. This natural gesture should not make important information disappear.
I use gmail just a few times per month, but get frustrated every time: how dare you to hide the date when I hover! This message is EXACTLY what I want to explore!
In new GMail design there’s no Compose button.
There are Chat, Spaces, Meet, Refresh button (yes, separate from the browser), layout selection, language selection, some sort of groups, activity indicator (for email?), Calendar, Keep, Tasks, Contacts. But no space for Compose button.
You can’t write a new email. In an email service. Literally
Thanks @altmindo for reporting this
GMail mistake #3: buttons that reveal themselves on hover.
The most common problem with that is that you don’t see the button in advance, meaning you can’t move your mouse directly to it. Instead, you have first to move your mouse to reveal controls, and then decide/correct after they appear. Two moves instead of one, big deal when it comes to the interfaces you use every day. Notion, as one example, has the same problem grumpy.website/post/0PhAYfy0b
But GMail made things even worse (being grumpy, I wouldn’t expect anything less from them). They put on-hover controls in a dense and _active_ area of an email card. To open any email you _need_ to click anywhere in that small rectangle. This is the _primary_ interaction, this is the one and only way to open emails and switch between them. But—surprise-surprise!—when you try to do so, accidental hover control might appear right under your mouse out of nowhere. Those hover buttons even overlap the text!
The worst part? Those controls are not even that important in the first place. You can do the same action after you’ve opened an email, or select it and do it from the top menu. In that case, GMail team tried to save you a click where you didn’t even asked for.
So I added a bunch of images to an email and hit "Send". Gmail is still uploading them, but I do not and should not care: do what you gotta do and send the letter.
But instead Gmail gives me a non-choice: send the letter without attachments (why would I say yes?) or cancel sending altogether (why would I say yes?!).
In other words, I have to wait for the machine and click the button when the machine is done. The machine is being the user, and I am being the servant.
What makes things even worse is that there is no progress indication of any sort. If you have a bunch of images drag'n'dropped into the body, they just start uploading asynchronously in no particular order. You have to scroll up and down to see if it's done or not.
Of course, the only sane way to manage this use case is to give me at least one option that correspond with my intention: "send after upload is complete".
Second bad feature of new GMail redesign: hover states.
First, they are animated which makes you nauseated pretty fast.
If you can sustain that, second problem kicks in: the reaction is not instanteneous. Instead of immediately filling background they start an animation that will fill it in 100ms. As the result, the whole UI feels slow and unresponsive even though there’s more than enough resources for it to operate.
I bet it looks cool in animation editor where you don’t get to actually use it. After the 100th time you’ve seen it, though, it doesn’t feel like a great idea anymore