[spindritf]

I'm rarely if ever troubled by UI changes but it took me a good moment before I figured out how to rerfresh your inbox in new Gmail. It's pretty obvious that you need to drag down when there are messages but without any (inbox zero) acting as an indicator, I went through all the options, and only picked the right move by accident.

If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.

[jbb555]

The new gmail is ok although it has absolutely no advantages over the old one so it's merely irritating they changed it just because they could. Except for the compose button over the top of my text which is really awful and I hate it so much

[stinky613]

> If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.

I agree that this can be a source of frustration. On the flip side, once you're used to it as a global UI pattern you might find certain buttons or indicators to be gratuitous. Now that I'm used to a global back button on Android, I feel totally lost on iOS when I want to go back/up. I'm no longer used to looking for a specific app button for that action because I'm used to it being a system-wide feature.

I'm wondering if this will become less confusing once the lion's share of Android phones and apps are using Material Design, as MD recommends that content is refreshed either a) automatically by sync or b) via the drag-to-refresh action.[1]

[1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/patterns/swipe-to-refresh....