What were they thinking: Gmail's lonely button

I noticed that my “What were they thinking” line of posts have been me making fun of apple products. Today I thought I’d post something about Gmail’s lonely button. Here it is in all its glory!…

Picture of lonely compose button.Right there in the centre of the screenshot is Gmail’s loanly “Compose mail” button. Hiding in the sidebar between the text based html links. I don’t see why that button deserves to steal so much of the users attention. I would think that a prominent text link would be more suited to the role. But wait! It turns out that the button isnt alone. The address book functionality has a “New Contact” button in the same place. Yea sure its consistent across apps. But does it steal users attention unnecessarily? I think it does. Im not a regular user of the web interface, let me know what you think in the comments.

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