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This feels like an admission of failure. A good UI wouldn't need an option like this.
by streptomycin 15y ago
This feels like an admission of failure. A good UI wouldn't need an option like this.
- anothermachine 15y agoOr an admission that there is more than one kind of person in the world?
- jaysonelliot 15y agoGood usability doesn't try to change for different kinds of users, except in extreme cases such as expert systems. For most applications, it's best to find one approach that will work across the board. In this case, icons, although they may look nice, should always be accompanied by text. Giving users options is an admission of failure, because it means the UI designers weren't able to come up with a single consistent solution that works.
- chefsurfing 15y ago> In this case, icons, although they may look nice, should always be accompanied by text. So right. Icons are too ambiguous for across-the-board use as Google has been implementing.
- timothya 15y agoSeems just to be a simple customizable feature. Do you think that the different whitespace options in Gmail are also an "admission of failure"? To me, they just provide different options to suit different people's visual preferences.
- jes5199 15y agodoes anyone choose a whitespace option other than Compact?
- lzh-ng 15y agoThe whitespace options are especially grating to me. Gmail offers 3 options, all of which are poorly spaced. Configurability isn't a replacement for good design.
- polyfractal 15y agoI'm still on the "classic" theme, and throw a bitchfit over feedback every time they try to force me into the new themes. Some of my accounts have been switched over to the new themes with no "classic" option, while others still have it available. I'll use classic until they fix the new crap, or allow me to continue using classic indefinitely.
- chimeracoder 15y agoI just threw in the towel and switched to mutt. I'd been meaning to try it out for a while anyway, and this was exactly the opportunity I needed to motivate me. (For anyone who's curious to try it out- I couldn't be happier, and mutt + offlineimap + mairix has ended up being the perfect combination for me... far better than Gmail web was at its best).
- Craiggybear 15y agoI, too, use mutt. Its my idea of what an email client should be. Text based. What is wrong with words?
- mayanksinghal 15y agoWhy do you assume that if someone wants to use a image, something has to wrong with words? Icons have replaced plain-text at a lot of places. The browser that I am using (and probably on your browser too), icons would have replaced: Back, Forward, Refresh. Probably because they save space or probably because they are language independent. Of course, one might have to hover on them for a second to realize what they do, the first time you try them - but next time onwards, those with a decent memory (and I am telling a limitation of icons, not discarding importance of those with poor memory), can remember what they are meant to do even when they use much lesser screen space. The central question is that what is wrong with images (and now an option to change them to text) if it is serving a much larger audience or serving the same audience better? And at what point did it became Gmail team vs Gmail users? "Haha, they lose because they gave us the option we wanted". Mind you, for each one of us who demand something, there probably are thousands who either don't care or like the new interface. Even at this thread, I can see two people using comfortable white-space setting. Even I hated the change from classic themes to Compact; now I am comfortable. Since when did we become to averse to change?
- dannyr 15y agoI see it as listening to users. But so what if it's admission of failure? What's wrong with that?
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThere was an apocryphal tale of the landscape architect being asked "These foot paths are perfect, how did you come up with that design?" And she answers, "We planted grass everywhere and then replaced where the grass had been flattened by people walking on it with foot paths."
- DannoHung 15y agoI had a professor once who explained how this can be problematic: What about the handicapped or elderly? Will they necessarily take the same paths? How does the ideal foot path change in winter months when there is snow? Is it just based on the first person who plowed ahead and started packing the snow down? In the spring, would the path be different if it rained often and you could walk underneath a tree? This is not to say that the story is without utility, but that it can't be a universal maxim.
- chimeracoder 15y agoThis is a perfect illustration of the how data is an important tool, and yet blindly relying on observable statistics can have problematic results.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]