14 DAY TRIAL // Google is on a quest to beautify its products, set by its dear leader Larry Page. About the time Google+ launched, Google products started adopting the new unified design. Gmail, one of Google's biggest products, adopted it a few months later.
As with most of the other design updates, Gmail's new look was rather criticized, but most people focused on the waste of space and some other details.
But one of the criticism that popped up later was the use of icons in the buttons. This is happening Google wide, but it's particularly problematic in Gmail and things like the Google Docs editors, which have several buttons for many functions, some of which users may not even know about.
The fact that they were rather abstract and monochromatic only added to the issue. Now, finally, Google has listened to some of the critics and introduced a new option to replace the labels with text, making it much more obvious to all users what the buttons do.
"When we launched Gmail’s new look, we did something different: we put icons on the buttons. Icons brought consistency across languages and solved problems with functions that had long names," Google explained.
"Some people loved the new icons. Others, especially low vision users, found words easier to distinguish. We’ve been listening to your feedback and we now have a setting that lets you turn the icons into words," it announced.
"You can make the change by clicking the gear to open Settings, and changing your button labels on the General tab," it added.
It doesn't really matter if you have low vision or not, the text buttons are much more easier to spot than the labeled ones. Of course, once you know where everything is, it won't really matter whether the buttons have icons or text, but casual users will have a harder time learning with the incon buttons.