
Ask HN: Change averse vs. truly awful? - jiveturkey
Is it me or is the new gmail look (forced on me today) awful?<p>They keep stretching the definition of &quot;compact&quot;. There&#x27;s new oceans (maybe it&#x27;s climate change) of whitespace between various elements. There&#x27;s less contrast (none, AFAICT) separating what are clearly different zones, eg the sidebar vs the email content. The default font is atrocious (for email).<p>There is a single good thing. They re-promoted a top level button from ages ago, mark unread. It&#x27;s in a &quot;section&quot; with the new snooze button. Quoted because you almost cannot tell it&#x27;s a section. Did you notice it&#x27;s segregated from the sections to either side with tiny essentially invisible bars?<p>I could go on for pages, and oh how I would love to, but that isn&#x27;t my main point.<p>I find I hate almost all UI changes of newly updated products. But surely, these are big companies and they absolutely must do A&#x2F;B user testing, right? Who in their right mind likes these changes?!?!? Is it some kind of job security for UI&#x2F;UX people? How do they get away with it? It just reeks incompetence to me, I don&#x27;t get it. Just look at iTunes&#x27; evolution for another prime example.<p>Or, am I just change averse?<p>Let me also point you to literally my favorite website, https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grumpy.website&#x2F;
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phnk
That won't be of any comfort, but I'm exactly the same as you.

My Twitter history is just a long litany of complaints to companies that
updated by their products by downgrading them, usually by:

\- breaking the product entirely (Apple Preview.app) \- removing useful
keyboard shortcuts (Excel) \- changing the UI with no going back option
(Gmail)

… and the UI changes usually boil down to: more whitespace, because those
products are getting influenced by their mobile phone versions.

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itamarst
Last time Google did a redesign of gmail, they tried it internally first.

Huge number of people complained. Personally it made my eyes "slide" out of
the text I was reading, not sure what they did but it was awful.

They started off with "Change aversion!@@#@", then they had to roll it back
due to enough complaints. Final version was better.

My theory is that Google designers each have three 32" monitors and never
leave the office.

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jey
I got used to it surprisingly quickly.

