Gmail is a Usability Nightmare | Hacker News Reader

Gmail is a Usability Nightmare

moron4hire.tumblr.com

56 pointsmoron4hire56 comments

Given that keyboard shortcuts are off by default, I don't think it's at all fair to claim gmail is a usability nightmare (based on that feature). They are an option for power users and you've chosen to enable them. The recommendation to turn them back off was quite correct.

If you find the task of turning that option off too difficult on your own, might I suggest taking the classic approach of "Googling it"? Again, for power users --> make option hard to find for less fluent users. That's intentional.

For what it's worth, I've enabled the keyboard shortcuts and never experience these issues. I'm personally quite happy they exist.

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of "boiling the frog slowly".

EDIT: I enabled keyboard shortcuts whenever they were first introduced, like, 8 years ago. They were actually good back then. They morphed into a demonthing in that time, just like the rest of Gmail.

E for archive has been there since the beginning of 2008.

And, by the way, it is E because Y just removes the label, inbox label if you're reading the mail in the Inbox or the label where you're reading the mail from if you're in a label.

My code editor keeps opening a totally useless dialog when I happen to clip ctrl-b instead of ctrl-v. My microwave insistently beeps every 2 minutes when I've put something in it even though I'm in the middle of doing something else and can't get to it. My washing machine won't let me open the door for 2 minutes if I've stopped it, even though all it was doing was anti-crease.

Computers and tech are just so bullheaded stupid, so completely and utterly idiotic.

They just don't learn and I know they can't.

The day when you can say to a computer or bit of tech, "don't do that again" and it not to blankly completely ignore you and do it again and again and again will actually be one of the great days in human history.

I don't want a singularity, I don't want to converse with my computer, I just want to be able to say 'stop it' and it to listen.

Soooo many times all of this.

Whoosh!

In a way the stupidity is nice, as it is usually very predictable.

Gmail currently has some sort of keyboard icon in the top right, that lets me choose between "English", "English Dvorak", "English" and "English".

There's no explanation of what it is or what it does. Since I know what a Dvorak keyboard is, I can guess it's some sort of keyboard settings. I deeply fear switching from "English" to "English" (or perhaps to "English" instead) because it seems likely it will be hard to recover from, so I haven't tested to see what it actually does. Perhaps "English" is the right setting for me instead of "English" or "English". I'll never know.

you seem to have been the only person to get the complete spirit of my post. Thanks, you made me grin.

Hah, don't get me started on the new "automatic categories". It made my work e-mail basically unusable. Github and JIRA messages would get sent to Forums/Spam/Inbox/Archive seemingly at random, even before hitting my custom filters.

Add Mavericks' Mail problematic integration with Gmail to that mix and what I had was useless filters, lots of important messages going to "the archive" without me ever knowing, and useless desktop notifications popping up for messages I didn't give a crap about. Pull requests mentioning me? Those would go to somewhere in the Archive. Completely random comments or commits on other projects I'm not working on? Yup, here, have a notification. Aaarggh!!!

Luckily I found a completely random rack that restored some sanity.

Yeah! Yet there is no way to configure that sort of stuff. I mean, we've apparently already committed to a Kitchen Sink effort in the damn General tab, why can't we have rules to manage that stuff in there, too? Instead, I've got my phone bouncing at me like a schipperke with spam from websites I had the unfortunate circumstance to have actually signed up for.

Drag the email to the tab you want it to go to. It will ask you if you want Gmail to do this for future messages from the same sender.

I've tried this. It worked, kinda. Considering we have some 10 active projects in the company, and each project can generate a bunch of different emails (pull request, comment, commit), I started wondering at what point my time was well spent training Google's algorithm.

(Besides, who the heck decided that categories should prioritized over my custom filters? I already had a perfectly working setup.)

Those categories might be the final push to force me out of Gmail if they remove an option to disable them.

I actually like the new automatic categories. They work decently well for me.

The main reason I like them is because I set it up so I only get notifications on my phone for the Primary category. Before, every random social network or promotion was giving me a notification on my phone, which I hated. Now I only get a notification for email I care about, and when I open up the Gmail app it fills me in on the random social and promotional crap I've "missed" out on in the meantime.

If important email ever ended up in the other categories, this would bother me, but so far it's worked well.

Notably, I don't use Gmail for work, and very rarely do I get truly critical email through my personal Gmail account.

The problem is that the definition of "important" is highly dependent on context. Github messages are not "important" in my general mail (I have, on occasion, contributed to some open source repos, that doesn't mean I want to receive an e-mail every time a contributor makes a commit), but they are rather important in my work e-mail. I guess Gmail, optimizing for the most common case, broke all the others. That is acceptable for a freebie (my personal Gmail), but not for a corporate tool you pay for (my company's Gmail).

I had this exact problem - with GitHub, JIRA, PagerDuty, AWS (both CloudWatch alerts and billing statements) all seemingly going to the most inappropriate category possible.

Had this happening on both our Gapps mail and my personal Gmail.

I rarely if ever surrender my sanity to use gmail online. Of course it's a "free" service and we have no right to complain. We are after all the product not the customer. Products do not complain. When's the last time your can of tuna said anything? We are Google Tunafish.

I really, really like that. Google Tunafish. Excellent.

Why people repeat ad nauseam the wrong mantra that if you're not paying,m you're the product?

You're not the fracking product, the product is ad space and is paid by advertisers

And, buy the way people pay for GAPPS

I think he's more pantomiming how it seems such companies treat us.

These type of sensational anti-Google posts on HN are getting really annoying.

> Of course it's a "free" service and we have no right to complain.

This opinion needs to stop. Of course you have a right to complain. They _want_ you to complain. If you don't complain, and instead stop using the service, then the service gets shutdown.

"They'd never shutdown gmail. Don't be silly." If no ones using it, of course they would.

Ugh, I really wish this overly simplistic view of the relationship would die. It only feels clever because it appeals to the big-companies-screw-everybody sentiment.

Would you complain less if you paid for gmail ? Just like you pay for Cable, magazines and formerly newspapers ? Would you cease to be a "product" then ? Serious question.

Anyone here understand sarcasm?

I'm very critical of Google's products, but I do like the UI of Gmail, especially the ability to search emails w the main compose window still opened. That single feature has me 10 times more efficient.

Although I always have a tough time finding filters, even after creating them so many times - they really do need to show it more clearly.

It's the Gmail iPhone App that has a horrible experience imo, always laggy, and crashing at random times.

True, Gmail's search is pretty awesome. I frequently use it to find year-old, two-year-old, even five-year-old emails.

that's because Gmail's iPhone app isn't really native, it's a webview wrapper like so many shoddy bank apps - just a better-made one.

Really? Wow... no wonder it's so awful. They should invest in a native one.

It doesn't help that it changes UI every week.

Especially the top right of the page. I tried to lean my mom how to change accounts, but the way to do that keeps changing, and because of A/B testing isn't even the same for everyone.

Watching her struggle with gmail made me realize what a cluttered mess it is.

Yeah, even I have been completely thrown by whatever is going on in the upper right corner of this window. At least 3, but probably 4 of these icons are G+ related. Either I use G+ (which I do) and I go there to use it, or I don't use G+ and no amount of pushing more icons in my face is going to make me.

I thought with time I'd get over the dislike of change and prefer the new gmail.

I hardly ever check my email from a computer anymore and the iphone app still feels so dumbed down that I have to go to the PC to make basic changes I an use on the app. Very frustrating. When they got rid of push for the native mail app is when all my frustrations started and I felt I had to move to the gmail app. It really hasn't been the same.

I continue to use Gmail because I have all of my important contacts setup in meaningful groups. The majority of my emails go to more than one person at a time. It's very rare that I send an email to a single person. Desktop-Web-Gmail includes group names in the auto-complete list of contacts in the To: line. This is a huge timesaver for me.

And it does NOT do it in Android-Gmail. It is so annoying to me that I will often write the email on my phone and just wait until I get back to a real computer to set the addresses on the saved drafts.

Every time I think that Gmail usability is so bad it can't get worse, the Gmail UX manages to surprise me. I have my own domain, so why am I still using Gmail? Don't know, probably because of integrated contacts and calendaring which sync so seamlessly with all of my Android devices.

Anyone has a good alternative free web based email + contacts + calendaring that syncs seamlessly with Android and allows custom domains?

I didn't used to use Google's Calendar. Then I married someone who uses it for everything. Now I use Google's Calendar.

Free is a thing, but you'll probably be happier if you pay someone to keep up with spam.

Not free, but Fastmail supports custom domains, is very fast, and now has calendars with CalDAV:

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2014/01/23/calendar-now-available-on...

Unfortunately, CardDAV is not yet supported for address books, but apparently they are working on it.

The advantage of paying is: no ads, no data mining, no privacy problems :).

A Fastmail account was the best technology purchase I made last year.

What's the story here? I'm always willing to purchase software if it's actually good.

It's a paid email service, with personal accounts starting at $10/year. Formerly part of Opera Software, but it's recently split off.

I think the main selling point is that there's actual support when you have trouble. And it'll get some of your data out of Google, which has become a bit of a trend among techies.

No, it starts at $40/year, unless you want to be wlesieutre_2111@fastmail.fm instead of wlesi@eutre.com.

Yup. But GMail starts at $50 per year if you want levos@metalo.com, rather than levosmetalo_42@gmail.com. Unless you are grandfathered in via the old Google Apps.

It seems that the probability of needing a number is also relatively small, since Fastmail has many domains available:

https://www.fastmail.fm/help/signup_domains.html

Of course, the $10 account is not really useful, since it comes with only 250MB space.

Yup, grandfathered. I remember I also had fastmail account when it was free, but lost it long time ago.

I'm not complaining about 40$, but the laziness and friction on changing provider of my identity is still there. And I can't really test how it would work until I switch completely to it with my primary account, since using secondary account is not a real world test.

I feel your pain. I am also grandfathered in a free Google Apps account.

I like Fastmail, but I need contact syncing, so I cannot fully switch until they've implemented that. And I'd miss the excellent GMail Android app. Especially it's search functionality.

$10/month. No tricks. Just fast mail.

http://fastmail.fm

Clean, fast interface with nice keyboard shortcuts. No automated filtering besides basic spam detection, and creating sorting rules is straight forward.

Its obviously not a 'nightmare' in that people will still use it gladly but its not great and has been getting worse for some time. Big problems it suffers from include:

* filling your screen by default with a plethora of things that an average user won't use and is vaguely terrified to touch because they aren't sure what they will do.

* lack of logical ordering of things. the structure behind screen real estate areas is poor.

a good case is the drop down below the Google logo to top left that says 'gmail' - does anyone use this? maybe a tiny percentage. would you even know what menu options might be hiding underneath a drop down that says 'gmail'? didn't think so.

I guess you are right. No, I don't literally wake up at night, sweat pouring down my face, screaming in terror over visions of Gmail.

It's called hyperbole.

I didn't say it was being used literally, just giving some meaningful bounds to move from the hyperbole to a more detailed understanding of the point.

If people weren't locked in by the pain of having to give out new contact info and the inability to migrate years of email and attachment history to another service, I can't imagine that gmail wouldn't have been disrupted by now. We were bribed with "free" disk space and now we're paying the price for it. (If I'm wrong about being unable to migrate the data, please let me know.)

> (If I'm wrong about being unable to migrate the data, please let me know.)

IMAP has been supported since '07. Takeout support was added last December.

Exporting contacts to CSV has been supported for as long as I can remember, though I cannot find a citation.

And still Gmail is used widely. I personally love Gmail. Even Yahoo's new design borrows a lot from Gmail.

You can't use folders as an analog to labels.

If I tried to understand English with a Swedish dictionary I would have problems as well.

G Mail works just fine for me.

Yeah, fuck that shit!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com