<story><title>Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose</title><url>http://storyblog.io/f11ffb15/anxiety-over-the-new-gmail-compose</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dasil003</author><text>The self-righteous anger about the irredeemable horror of the new Gmail compose is starting to get a bit old.&lt;p&gt;First of all, it&amp;#x27;s not as one-sided as people are making it out.  I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits.  Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).&lt;p&gt;There are some important philosophical reasons behind some of these changes that I strongly agree with:&lt;p&gt;First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good.  The OA seems to glorify long-winded CEO screeds, but by definition the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they&amp;#x27;re not I don&amp;#x27;t want to work with you), so it&amp;#x27;s correct to optimize for the short case.  The two levels of pop-out (the second of which the OA appears to be completely ignorant of) scale up and out quite nicely.&lt;p&gt;Second, the hidden headers and formatting options are encouraging simplicity in email.  Most email should &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; have formatting, and arguably most emails don&amp;#x27;t have CCs, BCCs, or edited subjects either.  Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out.  It takes a little while to get used to and then you just subconsciously do the double click, it&amp;#x27;s not really any harder than finding them in a sea of icons, it&amp;#x27;s just that previously &lt;i&gt;you were used to that sea of options&lt;/i&gt;.  The optimization for the common case is done correctly.&lt;p&gt;For me the new design (after turning on compact view) is a moderate improvement that did nothing to dilute the core value of Gmail which are the labels, keyboard shortcuts&amp;#x2F;navigation, conversation view and search&amp;#x2F;filters.  Running it inside Mailplane makes it even better.&lt;p&gt;There are definitely annoyances, but nothing that&amp;#x27;s even close to driving me to something like mutt, and forget about GUI clients, all of them feel like molasses compared to Gmail.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enochroot</author><text>I chuckled when I read:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sorry mom, I intended to write you a longer message but gmail encourages me to keep it short.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out.&lt;p&gt;Folks at Microsoft are nodding their heads and  furiously tweeting this sentence.</text></comment>
<story><title>Anxiety over the new Gmail Compose</title><url>http://storyblog.io/f11ffb15/anxiety-over-the-new-gmail-compose</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dasil003</author><text>The self-righteous anger about the irredeemable horror of the new Gmail compose is starting to get a bit old.&lt;p&gt;First of all, it&amp;#x27;s not as one-sided as people are making it out.  I was also annoyed when it first came out, but there are some clear benefits.  Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload (CTO for a 30-person company).&lt;p&gt;There are some important philosophical reasons behind some of these changes that I strongly agree with:&lt;p&gt;First, the small window by default encourages short emails which is always good.  The OA seems to glorify long-winded CEO screeds, but by definition the vast majority of emails are going to be short (and if they&amp;#x27;re not I don&amp;#x27;t want to work with you), so it&amp;#x27;s correct to optimize for the short case.  The two levels of pop-out (the second of which the OA appears to be completely ignorant of) scale up and out quite nicely.&lt;p&gt;Second, the hidden headers and formatting options are encouraging simplicity in email.  Most email should &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; have formatting, and arguably most emails don&amp;#x27;t have CCs, BCCs, or edited subjects either.  Putting them behind one extra click is really not the huge usability nightmare people make out.  It takes a little while to get used to and then you just subconsciously do the double click, it&amp;#x27;s not really any harder than finding them in a sea of icons, it&amp;#x27;s just that previously &lt;i&gt;you were used to that sea of options&lt;/i&gt;.  The optimization for the common case is done correctly.&lt;p&gt;For me the new design (after turning on compact view) is a moderate improvement that did nothing to dilute the core value of Gmail which are the labels, keyboard shortcuts&amp;#x2F;navigation, conversation view and search&amp;#x2F;filters.  Running it inside Mailplane makes it even better.&lt;p&gt;There are definitely annoyances, but nothing that&amp;#x27;s even close to driving me to something like mutt, and forget about GUI clients, all of them feel like molasses compared to Gmail.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mavhc</author><text>&amp;gt; Being able to browse email in the background while composing email is a huge win for my email workload&lt;p&gt;If only someone had invented a windowing GUI.&lt;p&gt;My main issues, now I&amp;#x27;ve set the default to fullish screen, is it&amp;#x27;s more like Outlook: editing the To&amp;#x2F;CC fields is annoying, and it wants you to always quote the entire email.&lt;p&gt;I await a Chrome extension to let me live in the past with people who knew how to use computers.</text></comment>