Google wants to make Gmail its new “home for work” by consolidating email, chat and Meet in a browser window, as well as a mobile app. That said, the company will maintain standalone applications for messaging and video calls, with Google Chat testing the redesign of the web client.
Google chat today is available to paying Workspace customers, while personal accounts can access it via chat if invited. The current web interface is a side drawer grouped by Pinned, Chat (messages for a single user or group), Rooms and Bots. The selected conversation is shown on the right for a very standard chat app layout.
The redesign is practically the same, but simplified with the left panel showing just chats and rooms, as well as Gmail’s Google Meet shortcuts for “New” and “Attend a meeting”. The topics appear on the right, but you can now “leave the entire screen” in the upper right corner. This creates a small chat window identical to Hangouts – Gchat before that – in Gmail on the web.
Docked at the bottom of the screen, starting from the right, they can be minimized so that only the contact’s name appears. You can do everything here, from adding emoji to uploading images, as well as browsing Drive files and submitting a Meet request.
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In addition to being quite familiar to old Gmail users, it is an efficient way to talk to several people at the same time. For example, it would be very convenient to have a room on the main screen and several windows fitted, so that constant change is not necessary.
Elsewhere, this new UI allows you to reduce the sidebar so that only profile avatars appear. The complete appears when you hover over it. The search field has been moved to the top bar, with “Active” right next to it.
This new Google chat design was not widely implemented and appeared on a personal account. This may be part of the company’s plan to migrate personal accounts from Hangouts to Chat before reaching the corporate customer.
More about Google chat:
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