Backward compatibility in user experience

Gmail recently launched a new design. I tried it out of curiousity. The first thing I noticed was that my muscle memory started failing me. Every time a new design comes, people focus on the look and feel of the design, its intuitiveness and other such factors but its compatibility with old design is not taken into account ever.

Power users tend to build muscle memory even for UIs. I tend to move my mouse to a particular location on the screen for the delete button for example.

With a product that has so many existing users, I think GMail should pay attention to these details as well when planning a new design. So, should other companies with similar products. An epic failure in the same lines is removal of start button by Microsoft. Of course a button position is not as critical; but the point is to have this criterion included in the design process.

GMail experience is too slow

Some time ago, I posted about the "Google" experience, where I mentioned about ease of use and speed being essential aspects of our regular usage of Google products and how Google [in my opinion] is doing it wrong by moving away from these key aspects. Here is one more incident. For the past two days, I have seen the following page a number of times.

It never happened to me before and I have been using GMail since the beginning of GMail itself. When I finally logged in successfully, I wanted to clear out my trash as it was huge. While it was deleting, it showed me the following lightbox.

It took more than 3 hours to complete the deletion of trash. I know that my trash is huge; but the time it took is way more. Overall GMail experience for me has slowed down considerably. When I create or update a filter, it takes at least 3 minutes to get back. People initially switched to Google because of its ease of use and speed; but now Google is gradually losing on those key aspects.