Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers, if possible with a large enough user base to avoid the sample-size bias ? I'd be interested to know if there were. That way, we could really compare if most people have a problem or not with the Gmail UI.
At least, we can see there was a significant increase of "Gmail interface sucks" articles when the new UI came out. That has to represent some part of the users, to the least.
Is there some kind of site somewhere that could simply gather votes on simple questions such as "do you like the Gmail UI ?" so that we can talk numbers
The problem is that the numbers don't matter in isolation. It's wrapped in two assumptions:
* That it's possible to make something that the vast majority of the population likes. Especially for something as complex and context dependent as email. No matter what Google does some section of the population won't like it.
* That it matters to Google (or any other company) that N% hate a product. I don't care if 75% of the world hates my product if the remaining 25% love it - and shovel money in my direction because of it.
The general problem with this is you don't know if you're sampling fairly or not. Perhaps the easiest way to do this (although there may be a sampling bias) would be to search twitter for 'gmail', 'gmail sucks' 'like gmail', etc. to get an idea of what people who tweet about it think.
I'm a sucker for clean layouts with a lot of whitespace, gradient-free themes and monochrome icons, but here there's just too much space wasted, especially with the bars in the upper part. That's my only real gripe with this Gmail and Reader redesign.
