Jasmine Watts
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1st rankedJasmine Watts
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This is awful for many reasons but I will really delve in what is wrong with this new layout:
Dark mode is absolutely atrocious on this layout. On the older you could change the color per inbox and create a very readable and easy view (and was also a nice feature). This is an obvious case of over-design in which readability and features have been sacrificed for app like design. Now, even on dark mode, the email becomes undecipherable at a glance. Adding so much grey with rounded lines and no space to create a quirky app style layout makes for a large info-heavy desktop look. Plus text is much bigger ,uniform,and closer together so quickly spotting dates, senders, and subjects becomes something you have to focus on rather that quickly glance over.
And don't even get me started on the expanded view. Why would I want emails to replicate the look of phone notifications. The date on right next to the sender on the same line?! If you wanted to replicate phone notifications the least you could do is put the date on the right side of the sender line. You need to understand the medium you create for. Text size, layout, ect. are all cohesive to the device you use. If you use things meant for a phone for web design then things become hard to look at and too big. These things work for mobile due to the fact that THEY ARE MEANT FOR A PHONE. The size and shape works for the phone screen. On a laptop or desktop screen you end up with a huge jumbled mess that is too close together with too much design. Desktop screens are big and therefore you should be using some sort of negative space in your design.
Which brings me to negative space: oh my god for the sake of everyone negative space is important for your eyes to identify what is important. When everything on the site has equal weight on the eyes its impossible to parse through information quickly. Instead I have to read through what feels like a wall of text which wouldn't be a problem for something mundane except THIS IS EMAIL! The one thing you would need to do when checking email is quickly parse through information. If you can't do that then what good is email for? In what little negative space there is filled with icons for attachments and such so you could theoretically have a whole page FILLED with just a few space bar clicks in between everything. Have y'all (and you work at an office so I know you have) worked in an office and had to read an excel sheet with no spacing and lots of information? Is it fun or easy to parse through that? No of course not. That's why design needs AIR!
Last but not least, as someone who is younger and can adapt to badly designed websites, older people cannot. You create a website that is not intuitive and annoying to navigate to the average user at best, and not intuitive and impossible to navigate to the older users at worst. Gmail is over-designed for the sake of trying to push forward. That's what so many people young and old hate. A "don't fix what ain't broke" situation. If you want every old person jumping down your support teams throat every 5 seconds then sure, keep a design that they can't navigate intuitively.
A core principle of design is to make sure you have an accessible and user-friendly experience first before any of the fluff of the design. I think y'all have failed at that, and I seriously hope you take that into consideration. And when I say "y''all" I don't just mean the graphic designers. I mean CEO's and managers as well, because I know some of your graphic designers tried to push against this but were ignored for the sake of impressing some shareholder with a "look we are doing something!" attempt. I get it, your product works too well as is and some man in a suit is asking "what are we doing next!", but I beg of you to realize that alienating all of your users to just give up and move to gmail is NOT going to make that shareholder happy.