New Gmail UI: When Lean Goes Wrong

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or still use AOL for email (the technological equivalent of living in a cave), you’ve probably noticed some changes recently to your Gmail user interface. The new layout has a different color scheme, more white space (which can easily be customized back to the old layout) and slightly revised functionality.

While not everyone has reacted with hostile outrage to the product, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, jumped for joy when they heard about the revision. After all, the old UI won Gmail 260 million accounts in the past decade and stands second only to Yahoo’s mail service in monthly unique visitors. In a technologically commoditized market where UI is everything, clearly the old Gmail was doing something right.

Which is why I’m pretty confident that I speak for the majority of users when I ask, “why?”

Look, I get iterations. I’ve blogged plenty about the Lean Startup and I’m fully onboard with the general philosophy of testing new ideas in the marketplace. But the key mechanism that drives the whole process is user feedback, and this revision doesn’t seem to address any specific customer need. Were users really complaining about the old color scheme, or having trouble finding Gmail’s features? It reeks to me of a project that placed too much importance on what the designers and developers wanted the product to be and too little on what the users wanted.

Google isn’t alone in falling victim to this tendency of iterating for iteration’s sake. Facebook seems intent on making sure my Events page is in a new location on the website every time I log in. Even if the newest layout is superior to its predecessors, the fact that it’s unfamiliar negates that benefit for the user. Perhaps more importantly, a UI that’s forever in flux doesn’t give me a chance to communicate (verbally or simply through my behavior) what I like or don’t like about the layout. How can you say a layout is better or worse if you change it again before users have had time to acclimate and provide feedback?

While the decision to change your product ultimately has to come from inside your organization, the impetus for that change should always come from the outside. If you aren’t solving a customer’s problem with each and every adjustment, it’s a waste of brainpower and money. I have no plans to leave Gmail or Facebook, so I’ll tolerate unnecessary and slightly irritating revisions. But just because I keep my account doesn’t mean the UI change improved the product, and it definitely doesn’t mean that it was an efficient use of the company’s resources.

There’s always a problem out there you haven’t solved, so don’t waste your time revisiting ones that you already have.