I guess you missed his irony. "Pointless" was a straw man of his injection to make his argument seem stronger.
At the end of the day most of Google's non-search products have lacked great design, this is well publicized and not very controversial and Google has made some great strides recently towards better design (Matias Duarte's work on ICS most famously).
I guess it's a matter of opinion but I always thought that Gmail was popular because of the spam filtering and the large amount of storage. Power users especially love it for the ton of features it offered along with support for keyboard shortcuts.
I never really liked the way Gmail was designed. It was functional but not very pretty.
Useful beats pretty. Look at where we are. Look at Wikipedia. These anti-engineers, pro-pretty design rants on HN are becoming really annoying. Look at pg website and tell me if it is "pretty". Shh...
That wasn't my argument even though I made no argument and said it was a matter of opinion. What is useful to you does not mean it's useful for everyone or even most people.
>Look at Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is well designed as is Google search. In my opinion, Gmail is not a place where I want to look at emails constantly.
> These anti-engineers, pro-pretty design rants on HN are becoming really annoying.
What made you think I was ranting or 'anti-engineer' in my post? Everybody has their job, engineers as well as designers.
You said "I never really liked the way Gmail was designed. It was functional but not very pretty." which, I think, is showing a misunderstanding of design.
Good design is not "pretty" and has very few, mostly indirect links with aesthetics. One of the possible definitions for "good design" could be "don't need user's manual", and "test users took less than x seconds to find and perform tasks A, B and C".
>Good design is not "pretty" and has very few, mostly indirect links with aesthetics.
Good design is 'not necessarily' pretty but what I consider pretty is not in the traditional sense. I did say that both Wikipedia and Google search are well designed sites. Good design to me doen't mean it has to look like Apple or Outlook.
For me, even though I know Gmail's interface, I can't look at it for nine hours a day. It feels like I'm working just looking at the site, much less accomplishing the goals I set out to do through mail. For me, good design keeps things simple and obvious until I need something more advanced. I feel like almost everything in Gmail is being thrown at me at once even if that may not necessarily be the case.
This doesn't mean it doesn't work for other people and it doesn't mean you're wrong in what works for you.
As an aside, I have a mother who knows nothing about technology. I had to set up her Gmail account for her and sometimes she forgets her password. She can't even use Gmail on the web. She can only understand Mail.app. I think she is representative of the average user.
Gmail had the Web2.0 style interface, everyone else had clunky, slow interfaces at the time; Yahoo Mail, for example, only moved to a similar responsive feeling interface much later. The design of the UI was also cleaner; it felt like the others had "junk" all over the page. The storage capacity was a huge plus as well.
Gmail was popular for the storage as both have mentioned and most of all the exclusivity. I certainly didn't beg my friend Bill for an invite when I found out he had Gmail because of the spam filters or ui or so I could have ads in my mail. I wanted Gmail because Google was the coolest kid on the block.
