A couple of years ago, right around the time Google’s Gmail team decided to start working on a standalone email app — the recently announced Inbox — a major redesign of Gmail was launched. As is the case with all Google products it was first released internally as “dogfood” to let Googlers themselves digest all the new features, or as was the case with this particular redesign, the removal of most of the advanced features. The Gmail team did not have to wait for the reaction for long. And it wasn’t very “googly.”
It caused an uproar teeming with disgust for just about every decision the Gmail product/design team made. Phrases like, “You guys just completely destroyed Gmail!” and “What are these crazy designers doing over there?!” were everywhere. From being spoken at many of Google’s cafes to every internal online forum.
Google engineers, in typical OCD engineer fashion, wrote long internal Google+ and forum posts detailing every single use case that was no longer supported, no matter how obscure. Hell hath no fury like a product team removing a feature an engineer had been using on a daily basis.
Add to that the decision to turn words into icons and add white space between rows and Google engineers were ready to storm the Gmail product/design team office with torches, swords and in full knight armor (you’d be surprised how many Google engineers own that stuff).
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