It may be mostly content vacant but I think the content was in the screenshots.
The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye.
The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.
Fair enough, there are 2 screenshots, one of GMail in message view, and one of a nested Google Analytics menu. But in the case of Google Analytics, the author spends most of the words complaining about a bugged/glitchy upgrade rollout. Which of course is worth complaining about, but shouldn't be the main example in a screed about company-wide failure – has there ever been, in the history of tech, a product upgrade+redesign that didn't glitch and anger long-time users?
But more to the point, GA is a specialized product for an audience of (relatively speaking) power users. What is the other analytics product that purports to deliver a comparable variety of metrics, in a more useful way? That's not a rhetorical question – I honestly want to know, and expected an article with this headline to have specific and tangible comparisons.
In the case of GMail – I honestly couldn't find how to get the specific view that the author sees. I'm still using the same GMail account that I opened in its launch month, which over the years I've tweaked to my liking – such as setting "Button labels" to "Text". So I checked a relatively new alt-Gmail account, and also my main Hotmail/Live account, and was surprised to see how similar the two interfaces are.
So what is the author's point of reference when he claims "Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch". I'm looking at my Hey account right now, and sure, it's different from my GMail interface, but I also use it 0.001% as much as I do GMail, and for a much smaller subset of communications. I sure as hell wouldn't tell people Hey is so much better than GMail and expect it to be self-evident to people, not without providing visual comparisons.
The first screenshot showed controls put into three different areas of the screen and icons with two different styles. The multiple areas makes it hard for the user to find the control they are looking for since there doesn’t seem to be an organizational principle. The inconsistency of icons (not to mention their inscrutability) is just cognitive noise. It turns what should be a joyful tool to use into a thorn to the eye.
The second screenshot shows semantic overload. It has too many options clumped together. People can’t process more than a small number of chunks of information at once. It is the responsibility of the designer to organize the information into a coherent and digestible number of chunks. It is called an information hierarchy. People use spacing, dividers, and other visual aids to achieve this. People also think hard about the correct information hierarchy.