I have heard the same thing about Google before, but obviously there seems to be a change. The old Google would not "push" a new interface when there is so much resistance to the new design. I may be suffering from a sample bias, but no Gmail user around me likes the new design. If they did test this stuff, maybe they cherry-picked their target population to get the results they wanted to please the designers. Who knows.
To give a counter example to your first point regarding the "old Google": A year or two ago they did a major redesign of the Google News page. There was a huge amount of negative and often thoughtful feedback in the user discussion forums, but it was all seemingly ignored, and the new interface was implemented ostensibly without change.
The page has since changed again, I believe, and it's even more of a mess. Scanning the page while scrolling is nearly impossible unless you've very carefully placed your mouse pointer over elements that do not expand on hover. (It's really maddening and I barely use the page anymore because of it.)
Thanks for the addition. Well when I refer to the "old Google" I am not sure where to draw the line, it may have started earlier than the recent G+ integration anyway. It has more to do with my perception of an "old Google" organization which used to be open to user feedback rather than the more recent one, blatantly pushing changes with seemingly no passion about their established user base opinion.
I may be wrong. To confirm whether things changed or not, we'd need to get Google insiders to speak out on that subject.
My history of closely scrutinizing Google products doesn't go back very far, so I couldn't say where the line between their old and new approach might be drawn. It also might be something that varied between product teams...
There is another possibility, that direct (verbal) user feedback is discounted as being "anecdotal" and not included when making "data driven" design decisions. But as you mentioned, this is all speculation without an insider's POV.
My intuition, however, is that their data-driven technique over-optimizes the various minutiae while allowing broader flaws to persist. I'd chalk that up to a lack of design vision to guide the testing.
It seems that the design elements were built progressively, while adding new features, by getting user feedback on what works and what did not. That was partly the reason why "Google Labs" existed in the first place.
I think there was a clear line drawn at least with the G+ integration, since they started consolidating the appearance of all services under the same UI and same color codes. There is a now a clear "design vision" in Google (even if it clearly sucks bad) and it's clearly not as Engineers-driven/Fonctionality-driven as before. Having Icons without text next to it is not just a style issue: it's a well known flaw in terms of usability. Everyone knows icons+text are superior to icons only. Especially when your icons are dark grey on light grey background. No differentiation whatsoever. I can't believe someone was actually paid to do this.
Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers, if possible with a large enough user base to avoid the sample-size bias ? I'd be interested to know if there were. That way, we could really compare if most people have a problem or not with the Gmail UI.
At least, we can see there was a significant increase of "Gmail interface sucks" articles when the new UI came out. That has to represent some part of the users, to the least.
Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers
The problem is that the numbers don't matter in isolation. It's wrapped in two assumptions:
* That it's possible to make something that the vast majority of the population likes. Especially for something as complex and context dependent as email. No matter what Google does some section of the population won't like it.
* That it matters to Google (or any other company) that N% hate a product. I don't care if 75% of the world hates my product if the remaining 25% love it - and shovel money in my direction because of it.
The general problem with this is you don't know if you're sampling fairly or not. Perhaps the easiest way to do this (although there may be a sampling bias) would be to search twitter for 'gmail', 'gmail sucks' 'like gmail', etc. to get an idea of what people who tweet about it think.
I'm a sucker for clean layouts with a lot of whitespace, gradient-free themes and monochrome icons, but here there's just too much space wasted, especially with the bars in the upper part. That's my only real gripe with this Gmail and Reader redesign.
