Recently they've launched Themes for GMail, the placement of information was prominent on the page, catches the user attention,Usable enough. But, when the user clicks on the 'Hide' and tries to revisit the Themes at a later time he/she has a mental load to figure out from where to access it.After spending a couple of minutes frantically searching for the link on the GMail, realizes that it could be under 'Settings', lands on the 'Settings' page and starts scrolling down the page to look at the term called Themes, doesn't find it.Finally, a smart colleague sitting next to him shows the Themes link on top of the page clubbed alongwith other links. The typical Usability problem here is the Placement, it's obvious to have it as top link,but lacks the prominence hence loses the Users' attention. Users would look for the information bang on page, rather than going through the navigation,because the teaching has not happened yet.Best way to teach users about a new feature is to display a call-out sort of message above/below the link which would improve the prominence to a great extent.
To support the above observation, I have done the User Testing with few colleagues of mine,including myself, we were actually scrolling down the page to look for 'Themes'.
Don't make users think!
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