
A former lead designer of Gmail fixes Gmail with a Chrome extension - georgecmu
https://www.fastcompany.com/90338929/the-former-lead-designer-of-gmail-just-fixed-gmail-on-his-own
======
wycy
> “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.”

Sure, not many desktop apps have a huge top left logo, but almost all websites
do. Acting like this is a unique failing of Gmail is strange to me.

~~~
colanderman
To compare, FastMail has no such logo. Just a big giant menu button that is
easy to find and click, unlike the five different tiny menu buttons, only some
of which are actually menus, hidden behind obscure icons and littered about
GMail's interface.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Per usual web tradition, FastMail has a logo in top left corner, which opens
the menu when clicked. Source: I have it open in another tab.

~~~
colanderman
Your FastMail is different than mine somehow. Mine just says "Mail" with a
drop-down arrow in the upper-left corner.

Note also that, in GMail, the logo isn't a menu. It is just a link to the page
you are already on. There's a hamburger menu _next to_ it, but that just opens
the sidebar.

~~~
colanderman
Too late to edit, I guess there _is_ a logo (an envelope with a swirly bit),
but there is no brand name like GMail has.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yup. That particular envelope with this particular swirly bit is their logo.

------
RenRav
I'm going to admit I wasn't even aware of the current design, probably because
other apps function well for my phone, and I've been using the basic HTML
alternative on my desktop for many years.

Neither of those examples actually look useful, the fix is definitely more
easy on the eyes though. The empty space between the rows of email messages
seems unnecessarily big. I get this was done for design's sake, and yes it
looks 'pretty' and 'light' in the flat minimalistic way, and otherwise you'd
have this dense chunk of the screen. I still think having twice (or comparing
to mine, even three times more) the emails displayed on a per row basis makes
scanning for things easier at a glance.

That fix actually resembles something I do to websites, ad-blocking away all
the unnecessary elements, siderails, wrappers, navbars, footers, etc. It's
very cathartic spending a few seconds resculpting a website to reveal only the
relevant content. And the end result always convinces me that less is more
when it comes to web design, that regular text and simple formatting should be
prioritized higher.

~~~
everyone
@RenRav Whats your workflow for 'ad-blocking away all the unnecessary
elements'? Sounds like a lot of work to me, but I do not work with the web.

~~~
RenRav
It's mostly something I do after discovering a useful site I'll likely be
revisiting in the future, sites with appreciable content but are otherwise
marred with poor visuals. When you've been doing it for years revisiting the
same sites, I think it pays for itself in terms of delivering more presentable
information.

Addons for Firefox include Aardvark, (generic) Element Hiding Helpers, Lizard,
Nuke Anything. You press whatever shortcut is assigned and highlight the
element your cursor is over (or highlighted text/section), an interface pops
up, you specify the domain filter (twitter.com), and filter by attribute
(import-prompt), OK, and the rule "twitter.com##.import-prompt" now forever
hides twitter's annoying import flex module.

The addons for Firefox I've seen are mostly GUI-based. An exception is Nuke
Anything, which I believe can be done through keyboard and context menu
options.

------
athenot
I don't use gmail so I'm surprised at how low the (useful) information density
is, in either version.

Extrapolating from that screenshot, it looks like that window could hold about
a dozen emails. I use the no-frills Mail.app on macOS and a window that's
takes about half or two thirds of my screen, and fits 40 emails. In my case I
also get to see the "To" address in the list, helping me quickly triage the
emails that are not sent to me alone.

Do people really prefer low density interfaces these days?

Removing the visual clutter is certainly an improvement but desktop apps have
the menu bar where they can put all the actions, whereas a web app is more
limited: it's either a mess of buttons or hamburger buttons which often end up
a bit clumsy.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I blame mobile, and the desire to reuse design (and often code) between
devices. Touch interfaces need big things because phone screens are small
relative to fingers. On desktop, such interfaces are unbearable to me; I hate
them to the point I actually installed Stylus extension and now hot-fix
websites I visit frequently with quick CSS work, to increase information
density (and by increase I mean double or triple).

~~~
mywittyname
Ironically, Inbox was a million times more mobile friendly than Gmail is.
Turns out, tabs make for poor mobile experience.

------
wojcikstefan
I'm curious if the HN crowd knows how one maintains such extensions
sustainably...

Just by glancing at it, I'd imagine that it's tightly coupled with the markup
and styling of Gmail. If Gmail changes anything about its layout, the
extension has to change, too. Does this mean that your extension is
periodically broken (and you have to be available to fix it after every layout
change/tweak) or is there a better way (e.g. some Gmail-specific APIs or some
such)?

------
spking
Direct link to extension discussed in the article:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-
gmail/pbm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simplify-
gmail/pbmlfaiicoikhdbjagjbglnbfcbcojpj?hl=en)

------
BrissyCoder
I was on board with this guy until: "...before landing at Nori, a company
addressing climate change with blockchain where he still works..."

~~~
chris_wot
Oh man, I thought the same thing! I though to myself "all that electricity
needed to maintain the blockchain, and they want to handle climate change?!"

~~~
sneak
Not all blockchains use a lot of electricity.

Electricity can also be generated in large quantities without changing the
climate.

~~~
josteink
It’s a zero sum game.

That electricity could have been used to replace polluting power-sources.

~~~
tasty_freeze
No, not if they expressly are finding a renewable source of electricity. Say
they have enough rooftop space to install solar panels to cover their needs
(don't nitpick that; just say it is true).

Yes, this company could have bought the solar panels and then sold their
electricity on the market, perhaps displacing some conventional energy source,
but that isn't their business.

Their business is this crypto market for carbon credits; they have a need for
power, they fill that need with a renewable source.

------
winningcontinue
I'd actually use that clutter around gmail and I have my settings on for the
densest text, so this isn't an extension for myself or everybody. That G-mail
logo on the upper left on the screen needs to go though. He's right about
that.

------
CalRobert
Cool, but it would have been nice to see that effort go to improving a non-
Google mail reader (Thunderbird, whatever) instead of furthering Chrome's
dominance.

------
jfengel
Most of this seems like a perpetual problem for UX designers. Feature creep
doesn't (usually) happen in a vacuum. Each feature exists because somebody
somewhere wanted it. OK, sometimes it happens because a mucky-muck wanted to
roll out a new product release, for income or attention, but that's not
GMail's line, since they make their income from ads rather than sales.

I honestly can't tell you whether the decluttering here is better or worse for
the average user. It's the kind of thing that's hard to measure, and the
aesthetic judgment is subjective. I can say that desaturating some of the
widgets looks nice: I myself have to constantly fight with my team who wants
to draw attention to their new feature by giving it a color pop.

But I myself don't feel that GMail's UX is so radically broken that it's worth
the effort of installing a browser-specific extension, thus binding me to that
browser and requiring me to re-install on every device.

------
enobrev
This change doesn't even touch Inbox. It removes the surrounding "chrome" and
adjusts the whitespace. That's not nothing as it focuses the UI, but Inbox was
far more than that. Not that I don't appreciate the time invested.

The design was welcome, to be sure. But there were far more important features
to getting email out of the way. Automatic, inline message grouping by travel,
priority, sender, etc; Advanced snooze that included "snooze until delivery
date" for packages; Infinite Snooze, which was great for bookmarks with notes;
Big, clear done / delete buttons; No ads - not that I expected that to last.

It's been long enough that I've begun to forget the other features since I
switched back soon after the announcement, but moving back to gmail has been
jarring. The old design is confusing, yes, but I can manage as I'd used it for
a decade prior. The design was essential, but mostly icing.

------
kevinalexbrown
It's funny, I was thinking that Inbox did this nicely, and of course he did
that too.

------
therealmarv
Interesting. Always had the feeling that Inbox could be the ONE interface to
all (main) Google products but somebody had stopped the train on the way to
this idea. Seems I was right about my feelings...

------
plibither8
Here's the HN discussion of the extension:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19558661)

------
racuna
Gmail works awful on Firefox (slow, heavy memory usage, etc).

Some things are fixed in the last releases of FF, but according of what I read
recently, Google is doing this on purpose.

Any addon or userscript recommended?

------
aytekin
I do inbox zero so I am not usually looking at the email list, but to the
actual emails. I also started using larger fonts as I am now 40. So, the
amount of space the left and the top frames take up is quite a lot. I haven’t
tried this but hopefully this can fix that.

By the way, here are the tricks I do to do inbox zero on gmail:
[https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290175](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290175)

~~~
graeme
Thank you! The "moving backwards up the list of emails" might be just the
thing I need to clear out my email backlog and stay on top of things. I didn't
know gmail could do that.

You're being downvoted for being off topic perhaps, but in years of looking at
threads like this I'd never seen that tip. And not using the UI at all is a
viable approach.

Incidentally I must be on an old UI, my gmail looks nothing like that. Either
version looks harder to navigate than the classic one.

------
megous
To me fixing gmail would mean fixing in-message quoting, so that it actually
works, and adding some option to discourage top-posting in e-mail
conversations that obviously don't use this style of responding.

Bonus points if the gmail webmail would re-flow quotations correctly and not
break the lines inappropriately.

Hiding some icons fixes nothing. It's just a style chnage.

------
Keloran
Are there any paid for chrome extensions ?

I just seemed like an odd thing to keep emphasising “a free chrome extension”

I thought they were all free

~~~
galvin
Some are tied to paid services

------
agumonkey
So very relaxing. A bit like the night time writer modes for editors.

Also it's interesting to see this guy's history. Many of his ideas were great
but failed to sustain themselves as-is. But he keeps coming back with other
great ideas.. I hope he gets something out that gets a nice and long spot.

------
GoblinSlayer
>Michael Leggett is even more annoyed with Gmail than you are.

Then why he doesn't give Google the boot?

~~~
ejolto
He quit Google last year, he's working at a blockchain startup now.

------
rozhok
Switched to plain HTML version after the redesign was rolled out and have no
regrets about it.

------
pier25
I tried the extension for a while and ended up removing it since it removes
the top toolbar when seeing a single email.

I hated the design of the new gmail when it came out, and now I tolerate it,
but that toolbar is handy nonetheless.

------
fiatjaf
I would prefer an alternative web client that talked to the Gmail API, because
the normal UI is not only unusable, it's too heavy and slow and that extension
doesn't fix these problems.

------
diNgUrAndI
> he did a short stint at Facebook working on Messenger, before landing at
> Nori, a company addressing climate change with blockchain where he still
> works.

Blockchain. Interesting.

~~~
threeseed
Be hilarious if it relied on an algorithm that needs mining.

~~~
tromp
Quoting from the Nori whitepaper at [https://nori.com/white-
paper](https://nori.com/white-paper) :

Carbon Removal Certificate (CRC): a digital asset, or electronic certificate,
that is stored on the Ethereum blockchain in the Nori application. One CRC
represents one tonne of CO2-equivalent heat trapping gas that has been removed
from the atmosphere and stored in an industrial, terrestrial, subsurface,
and/or aquatic reservoir.

------
drumttocs8
Why move the "select all" checkbox away from the messages you're trying to
select? Talk about bad UI...

------
techslave
gotta love this guy: “I’m not the world’s best designer by any means” ...
where’s that place the current gmail team then?

------
Ahmed90
Pretty? Yes! Practical? No!

------
srfilipek
> before landing at Nori, a company addressing climate change with blockchain
> where he still works

Oh come on...

~~~
gustavmarwin
Elaborate?

~~~
thousandautumns
Well first of all, blockchain technology has become so overhyped that its
bound to draw scoffs even if the business case were legitimate. "Blockchain"
anything almost sounds like a joke at first pass these days.

But in this specific instance, it is even more ridiculous as one of the
biggest concerns surrounding blockchain technology is that it is insanely
inefficient in terms of energy usage, and concerns have been raised about how
widespread usage of blockchain technology could exacerbate climate change.

~~~
gustavmarwin
It's sad to see YT community members being so ill informed. Proof-of-Stake is
coming in leading blockchains such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, etc. This is
changing. It's a new technology it takes time to improve. Anyway, do your
homework before commenting on things you don't understand.

~~~
srfilipek
> Proof-of-Stake is coming

There have been so many proposed algorithms on this idea over the past years,
yet here we are, still waiting. For now, it's either vaporware or it has a
security flaw.

Or, like traditional proof-of-work mining has become, it will coalesce into
the very thing it was meant to remove: control by a few powerful and
centralized authorities.

Regardless, blockchain is not going to help solve climate change. A
distributed carbon credit market is not going to solve climate change.

I want proof-of-stake to work. I really do. But I just don't believe it can
anymore...

~~~
xur17
> There have been so many proposed algorithms on this idea over the past
> years, yet here we are, still waiting. For now, it's either vaporware or it
> has a security flaw.

There are several proof of stake networks running right now. Care to elaborate
on the security flaws?

