{"id":487,"date":"2012-04-23T12:44:18","date_gmt":"2012-04-23T16:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=487"},"modified":"2012-04-23T12:44:18","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T16:44:18","slug":"gmail-ui-design-flaws-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/gmail-ui-design-flaws-stars\/","title":{"rendered":"Gmail UI Design Flaws:  Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gmail has finally forced the new design on me, and there appears to be no way to revert back. \u00a0It&#8217;s tricky to separate style changes (highly subjective) from usability tweaks, but I really feel that the new design is a <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2011\/11\/04\/why-the-new-gmail-interface-is-so-bad\/\">huge step backward<\/a> in usability.<\/p>\n<p>One case in point: \u00a0stars (flags) for messages. \u00a0They&#8217;ve been moved to the right side, so they now appear like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/ScreenSnapz3.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-488 alignnone\" style=\"border-image: initial; border-width: 2px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;\" title=\"ScreenSnapz\" src=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/ScreenSnapz3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"313\" height=\"211\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is a less important place on the page &#8212; we read left to right, scanning the sender and subject first. \u00a0The star&#8217;s function is to mark the most important messages, so it should be in an important place (on the left). \u00a0Even worse, they&#8217;re not even aligned anymore because of the &#8220;reply&#8221; button, creating more visual work to locate the stars. \u00a0Why is this an improvement?<\/p>\n<p>Also, the left rail has now been replaced with a person-info icon that you can hover over and click to expand messages, completely redundant with clicking or hovering over the sender&#8217;s name. \u00a0Why?<\/p>\n<p>Worse, they show the person-info hover dialog for <strong>my own<\/strong> emails. \u00a0Why?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gmail has finally forced the new design on me, and there appears to be no way to revert back. \u00a0It&#8217;s tricky to separate style changes (highly subjective) from usability tweaks, but I really feel that the new design is a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/gmail-ui-design-flaws-stars\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}