Gmail iOS app

Google pushes Web apps as hard as Apple pushes native ones and when two world collides, the crossbreed chimera inevitably creates a climax.

The release of Gmail for iPhone and iPad was one of this moments. Tech enthusiasts and casual iOS users were expecting a lot from it. Why? Because of the ‘native’ branding that @parislemon leaked a few days before the actual release. It was a huge reason to get excited. Google might have decided to step up its game on iOS. 

Web apps can be great and I am honestly impressed by some features and UI choices of the Gmail iPhone app:

- The sliding pane à la Twitter on iPad (also recently seen in the Facebook app revamp) makes sense here. 

It allows users to keep context. It feels both re-assuring and quicker (even if the number of tap to navigate from the label/folder screen to the message list remains exactly the same if you compare Mail.app or Gmail for iPhone). The main screen is always there, visible and touchable. You can’t end up with the feeling of being lost in the app because you can ‘grab’ your way back anytime.

- The pane design is great. Grey and blue are really clear and legible. The two level of recess of the pane are also great even if they don’t serve any purpose. It’s playful.

- It’s fast. The refresh feedback is not the best one either but it’s clear and unobtrusive.

- Threads allow to navigate all mails from a conversation within one screen withtout the back and forth you get in Mail.app.

- Undo everywhere is great. I find myself using it a lot.

The Bad:

- The message list is barely legible (which is bad for a mail application)

- Icons: Google is known for its GTD approach vs. Apple’s polished style. That has been a reason for their success but there is not a single icon in the application that you can honestly look at without being confused or embarrassed.

- The compose window: not taking advantage/respecting the default HIG modal views from iOS can lead to real catastrophes. In Mail.app, while composing a message, you can either ‘Send’ or ‘Cancel’. Tapping ‘Cancel’ triggers a 3-option choice: delete draft, save draft or cancel (going back to composing your message). Delete and Save will bring you back to your message list as expected since you’re done with composing.



The Gmail web app tries to create a simpler way to do this that ends up in something that couldn’t be described as anything else than a massive brain fuck.

You open your compose window…and boom! A trash icon. That’s the first thing you see. If you’re lucky enough, you stumble upon the skinny attachment icon before the gigantic disk one. The disk icon obviously means ‘Save’ for everybody over 25Y but a simple ‘save’ label would have suffice. 



What can you do with the trash icon in your compose window?

Before even writing a single word, you can use it as a ‘Back’ button. But it turns out it’s a shortcut to do 3 things at once:

- Delete the current draft

- Close the compose window

- Go back straight to your message list

This is what the trash icon does. 3 things. Even for me, it’s going too fast.

- Threads: threading is great. It’s Gmail’s greatest feature. But it doesn’t work well on the iPhone because you can’t impose scroll-stops at each threads. It would make sense to clearly signify the user that he is switching from one mail to another within a conversation by stopping/slowing down the scroll but this would also ruin the experience. Think about navigating a 100+ thread…

The continuous scrolling makes the reading experience quite intricate because nothing, except for the color-coded sender name, catches the eye and you never really know where you’re at in a conversation if you don’t stop to read a random mail.

In addition, web views in the app still have weird scroll behavior with an inertia that doesn’t feel iOS-like at all.

- Selecting a mail triggers a pop-up at the bottom of the screen that you can close with a little cross. This cross is so equivocal that I asked myself twice if I should press it. I was honestly afraid it could delete the mail.

- Refreshing by clicking on the navigation bar doesn’t make sense. Pull to refresh is already there. Discovering the option is tough but not being rewarded for it is even tougher. Why trigger a refresh instead of another action for power users who took the time to play around?

- One account only

I am convinced that Web apps will take over native in the coming years. That’s the main reason I am respectful of the work done on the Gmail app. They’re ahead of their time and they’re putting up with the initial problems.

In 5 years or so, it will be hard to tell the difference between a web and a native app. Companies like Google, Facebook and Sencha are already pretty close from this stage on some of their products: Facebook for iPhone, Google+ for iPhone and Sencha-made apps are quite impressive. 

This gMail ‘native’ app suffers both from a communication issue with a misuse of the word ‘native’ and a blatant lack of attention to details (as John Gruber puts it).

Mixing a bit of Dylan and MG Siegler, I would say: 

The faith is (not) gone yet but it’s getting there

The impossible Bloomberg makeover

The rewarding pain paradox

Re-designing Bloomberg’s Terminal is any interface designer’s dream. There’s obviously much room for improvements since the interface has not changed for a while and the ‘personas’ using it are quite easy to define.

Nevertheless, the complexity and richness of the displayed data, the necessity to fully understand how traders use the tool and the immediate impact it could have on the work efficiency of more than 156 000 users around the world makes it a tremendous challenge.

Here is a picture of the Bloomberg Terminal as it stands today (2010). As most users say, “it’s hideous”. 

Here is the Bloomberg keyboard:

Ideo has submitted a proposal back in 2007 after a 3-week study. Here is how it looks:

A widget allows you to zoom in on some detailed part of Ideo’s design and have some explanation on the choices they’ve made. You can also read a short description of the project on their website.

But as the PortFolio.com article clearly puts it : “Bloomberg isn’t looking to do a major overhaul of its terminals’ graphic design anytime soon. In fact, company executives see the Bloomberg terminal’s unique presentation as a status symbol and a selling point. “We have to be religiously consistent” to satisfy users who become attached to terminal’s look and feel, says Bloomberg chief executive Lex Fenwick. “You can see a Bloomberg from a mile away.”

The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.

Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current “complex” interface. The pain experienced by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text are strangely transformed in rewarding actions by users.

The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied users are.  

The bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it. Having been a user of the Bloomberg Terminal for 5 months, it took me a week and a few painful hours to handle it and I am no genius. The only real impediments were the unbearable UI, remembering which key to push to make the “magic” work and having to go through the 86-page manual.  

Bloomberg’s terminal interface will not evolve any time soon both because of the leadership Bloomberg has on the market and because users will not be satisfied with something simpler and more efficient.

Bloomberg is an extreme case of a common UI phenomenon where users take pride and find highly rewarding to handle a painful interface. Obscure UI are generally only accepted by early adopters on brand new or highly innovative services. Most of the time, the success of the service and the growth of its user base makes it both necessary and natural to re-design the UI. Despite the fact that Bloomberg is a market leader and benefits from a large user base, this pattern of UI evolution has never come true.

The only valid reason explaining why Bloomberg design will not change is the behavior of its users. Users who favor complexity and clutter over efficiency and clarity to sustain a fictive status symbol.

This post was published on UXmagazine.com

Reblogged by: Lukas Mathis on Ignore the code, John Gruber on daringfireball, Chris Clark on Release Candidate One