Last night I noticed Google had added a few new features to Gmail. There isn’t anything revolutionary, and the one that interested me the most is what they call the “Embarrassment-reducing new message notification” which will let you know if a new message arrives in a conversation while you’re in the middle of composing a reply to that conversation. Most of the other updates are fairly minor.
The one thing I did note was the user interface changes. And I wasn’t really thrilled about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I read Google Blogoscoped this morning and they nailed it: the UI uses too many random types of interfaces. There’s no real consistency between what’s a link, what’s a dropdown, or even what type of dropdowns are used. They’ve got regular HTML dropdowns in some places and shiny DHTML dropdowns in others.
It seems while Google can do a simple interface with one function really well, their UI people stumble a bit when they need to offer a lot of options to the user.
