5 Problems with Gmail’s New Design ⇥

Joe Brockmeier:

Reasonable people can disagree on what makes for an improvement in a user interface, but adding more steps to typical user actions is rarely seen as an improvement.

But that’s exactly what the new theme for Gmail does.

Some guy named Steve Jobs, eight years ago:

Design is how it works.

This is an extremely difficult concept to understand, and even more challenging to successfully implement. Apple doesn’t have a perfect track record (no company does, or can), but Google seems to have the opposite idea of what design should do. It’s fine to disagree with certain philosophies and try something new, but at the end of the day, the new UI has to function better than the old one. Google’s recent rollout of similar redesigns fails at this basic principle.