New Gmail Layout: Show labeled text buttons again

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on April 24th 2012 - Listed in Internet Mail Cloud

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Google's famous free mailing service, Gmail, has created a new layout back in November 2011, which imho is less intuitive and much slower than the previous one. At least Google permitted to continue to use the old layout - until this month. The option "Switch back to old layout" is not there anymore and now long time happy users like me have to adapt ;-).

The first big bugger is the fact, that the buttons use icons instead of text labels now. I'm usually a fan of nice created icon-buttons but in this case I lose more time looking for the right button than if it would've been labeled with text. The icons also increase the risk of pushing the wrong button...

Luckily Google acknowledged that the text labeled buttons are probably easier (and faster) to read and recognize and gave an option to revert to these text buttons. And here's how you do that:

On the right side of the screen click on the Settings icon (a gearwheel). Then click on Settings:

In the Settings make sure you're in the first tab (General). There's a setting called Button Labels, this is the one you want to change to Text:

After hitting Save Changes at the bottom of the Settings page, you will see the text labeled buttons again. And honestly, take a look and compare the following menu, which one would you think is easier to 'guess' the action of the button?

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