Users Initial Feedback On Gmail’s New Look

( Cross Posted From The Gmail Blog )

A few weeks ago, they released a preview of Gmail’s new look via two new themes. They asked us to try them out and send them your feedback. So far, less than 5% of Gmail usage is happening through these themes, but they’re getting some good feedback on what’s working and useful advice about what to improve from you early adopters. 

What we like

• The clean and minimalist look of the new design
• Seeing a consistent “look” across Google products

“The new Preview theme is wonderful! It's clean and crisp, easy to read and really focused on the one thing that matters most in Gmail — the mail! Thanks!"

What we want to change

• Too much white space and not enough information (though interestingly, many people reported that they appreciated to lower information density after a while)
• Not enough contrast
• Darker theme options

"Even with the 'dense' version, I still have listings of about 30% fewer messages. The lack of visual differentiation between content and UI chrome is also harder to process (e.g., where does the conversation list end and the toolbar begin)."

They’re working on improvements for the final release, but it is very encouraging that a visual update like this was generally greeted with such a positive response. If you haven’t tried out the new themes yet, give them a go and tell them what you think.

More about → Users Initial Feedback On Gmail’s New Look

How do I turn off the new "important" label in Gmail?

Priority Inbox has a number of options for customization. You can find most of these by clicking the gear icon in the upper-right corner of Gmail, and then selecting Gmail settings, and selecting the Priority Inbox tab. Here’s an overview of the choices you can make there:

Default inbox

Allows you to choose what you’ll see when you open Gmail. You can have the default view be Priority Inbox, your regular inbox, or whichever view you were on when you were last in Gmail.

Priority Inbox sections 

You can customize up to four priority inbox sections; just select the options you’d like. This lets you define what groups of messages that you’d like to show in Priority Inbox. 

Filtered mail

If you already use filters to help you identify which messages are most important to you, Priority Inbox will respect your filtering system -- in other words, it will not show messages your filters specify should skip your inbox. If you want, you can have Priority Inbox show messages that would otherwise skip your inbox: just select the option in the Filtered mail section that works for you. 

Importance markers 

Select Show markers or No markers in the Importance markers section to turn the colored arrows on or off. 

Show Priority Inbox 

To see Priority Inbox, just select Show Priority Inbox. If you would like to not see Priority Inbox select Do not show Priority Inbox. 

More about → How do I turn off the new "important" label in Gmail?

Call Phones from Gmail

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail. 

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.

We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception.

If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

We’re rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so you’ll be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in your chat list (you will need to install the voice and video plug-in if you haven’t already). If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly - so stay tuned!

For more information, visit gmail.com/call.

Update (8/26): This has now been rolled out to everyone in the U.S. If you don't see the feature yet, try logging out of Gmail and signing back in.

More about → Call Phones from Gmail