Google have taken quite a few missteps with their UI changes to Gmail and Youtube especially. I'm not a designer, but as a web developer know a thing or two about easy-to-use and decent interfaces. The new Gmail compose popup to me signifies the once predominately engineer led company is turning into a design led one.
While being a design-led company isn't necessarily a completely bad thing, you need those engineers and developers guiding the designers and keeping things in check. Unrestrained creativity can be a dangerous thing.
I feel the same way about the new compose popup. It's intrusive and distracting and I even emailed them about it sometime ago. I got some cookie cutter response about how Google are continually refining their products, blah blah.
I would use a third party email client, but email is crucial for me and if the chances of something going wrong between the connection of the client and Google's servers are higher than that of losing an email composed within the Gmail interface itself.
While being a design-led company isn't necessarily a completely bad thing, you need those engineers and developers guiding the designers and keeping things in check. Unrestrained creativity can be a dangerous thing.
I feel the same way about the new compose popup. It's intrusive and distracting and I even emailed them about it sometime ago. I got some cookie cutter response about how Google are continually refining their products, blah blah.
I would use a third party email client, but email is crucial for me and if the chances of something going wrong between the connection of the client and Google's servers are higher than that of losing an email composed within the Gmail interface itself.