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Comment by oftenwrong | Hacker News Reader

It is quite sad how often I end up having to help older relatives with their computers on account of unintuitive UI. One memorable, recent example was my mother, who could not figure out how to get her GMail sidebar to un-collapse itself.

Here's a screenshot of a collapsed sidebar:

https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment...

and a screenshot of an un-collapsed sidebar:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/RC-Convers...

It took me some time to realise out that it is the hamburger-menu-like icon in the upper-left corner. It has a tooltip that says "Main Menu", but it is not a menu. It controls collapsing of the sidebar. Confusingly, it is positioned in the top panel, separated by a line that would make one think it is not related to the sidebar, and closer in affinity to the logo, search box, etc.

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I just started a new job and they use Gmail for the email, it has been probably well over a year since I logged into gmail on web.

That’s side hamburger button throws me for a loop every. Single. Times. For some reason I keep thinking it’ll bring up the other gsuite apps, but instead the whole page shifts awkwardly aha then the sidebar disappears, “that was not what I was expecting” is my reaction every time.

You may want to try this one: https://simpl.fyi/

Oh that looks great, thanks!

Amazing, thanks for this

The white-background screenshots give me borderline anxiety. It looks like it's perpetually half-loaded.

Google’s UI has been cycling between bad and worse. That goes across the board - websites, Android, apps, everything.

I have never come across a Google product and thought “this is a well designed and clear to use program”. Except perhaps Google Search and Gmail of old - between circa 2005-2008.

You don't have to be elderly to be baffled by the "amazing disappearing user interface". I've accidentally turned off UI bits in everything from browsers to dev environments to PDF viewers to games. Invariably the affordance of "please unhide this UI element" is more minimal/obscure than it should be because the goal of hiding the UI element runs counter to "leave a nice big affordance behind so I know how to get the damn thing back".

I was confused about what you were talking about until I saw your screenshot. Fascinating. Coming from Android it is completely normal that hamburger on the left is drawer and three dots on the right is menu. Pretty much every app does it so you can't help but learn it but if you're coming from the desktop and it suddenly appears it makes a lot less sense.

But doesn't the burger menu usually open/close a drawer? On gmail all it's doing is expanding/collapsing the menu that's always on the screen no matter what. Feels like Google is breaking their own convention here.

It can do either. Small screens close it as there usually isn't enough space for it. Large screens do have the space so it minimizes rather than closes, and it's especially imperative that it does so, because if it closes on a larger screen, it's unintuitive to swipe from the side of the screen like it is on mobile.

Thunderbird (an email desktop client) has a similar issue: some keystroke (I don't know what, but I've accidentally hit it a few times) collapses the folder view on the left. The only way I've found to restore it, is to mouse-drag the dividing line back right. But it's not clear there is a dividing line, you have to guess that it's there, and be excruciatingly careful about positioning the mouse cursor.

I've heard that GMail has a "basic HTML mode", but I'm not sure whether that would help in this case.

I don't use GMail so I could be considered a "fresh user", and I couldn't guess the right button from the first screenshot either --- I thought it would be the big colourful "+", because that's usually the symbol for "expand".

It does, but that mode has its share of other issues. I accidentally lose the draft I’m working on, every time I use it.

What's bothered me most is how if you collapse Gmail's sidebar, the "no Hangouts contacts" section in the bottom half doesn't resize or adapt.

It probably doesn't hurt usability directly, but it seems very unprofessional

YouTube does that too, but on smaller screens. Still confused me to death in the first couple of times.

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