My GMail account had some new features when I logged in this morning. The most noticeable addition is Contacts, a lonely looking link that lets me manage the contact information of anyone in my GMail inbox. I don’t really do contact management (I’m not that important), but I like that GMail takes the task of adding a contact completely out of the hands of the user: if you’ve interacted with me, you’re a contact. Simple! Outlook would do well to adopt the same philosophy.
There’s also a new hover interaction for names. It’s well designed visually–any time a designer puts several different pieces of functionality into small space but makes it appear uncluttered, she’s done something right. What one can do within this hover interaction, though, seems very limited. It’s prominent, striking functionality that I don’t anticipate using.
My favorite changes are also the most subtle. I love the clean lines and balanced padding around “More Actions” (but can we do something with that Refresh link? Ug-lay!).
GMail now uses a more muted yellow for messaging users about non-critical system activity. The previous orangish background was too loud for communicating system confirmation messages. It always gave me the feeling that something went kind of wrong, but not red wrong. The new yellow is softer and communicates the proper tone: “something just happened, but nothing is wrong.”
Conclusion: A solid if unspectacular update to the world’s best webmail client. sans comic sans gives the new GMail a B+, an 8.8 out of 10, and a check-plus-minus.
Comments 3
Now if they would only warn users about downtime while doing the upgrades at 11 pm PST. An email or an outage notification in gmail would be nice.
Otherwise, I give golf-claps to the cleaner look, especially ‘more actions.’
As for contacts, it’s nice to have a history of email addresses without having to do manual entries. I just refound odie.its.uiowa.edu, no longer pingable :(
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 3:35 pm ¶I’m glad you’ve pointed out the new UI changes because I honestly hadn’t noticed anything different. And perhaps that’s a sign of a good UI rollout – when the user doesn’t even notice that anything changed.
There is one thing that I wish Gmail did change – use less blue! I’m sick of that baby blue. And I work at a company that loves to overuse blue!
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 4:30 pm ¶Ha, I don’t think I would have noticed these changes either, except that I had an extra cup of coffee this morning.
Posted 08 Nov 2007 at 5:23 pm ¶Post a Comment