A disturbing trend in usability

Developing great looking interfaces with good usability is hard. And I certainly understand developing newer interactions that are forever pushing the boundaries of getting more done in ever shrinking display real estate. 

One of the things I'm proud of is having been involved in setting accessibility group in motion at Google.   It's good to see when Google makes changes that help more people use the web at large and get access to the information they seek. An integral part of such changes is that Google pays a lot of attention to usability through extensive testing. Or at least it used to. 

It pains me to see interfaces that are changing for worse. Case in point- the new interface (which will become the default soon) of GMail, Google Docs, Reader, etc. There are number of problematic changes that don't make any sense- For instance, the labels and the chat widgets each have their own scrollbars in GMail. Why is this a problem? It breaks usability by requiring mouse action. Another example- the actual content (in GMail's case- the first message header) is pushed to about 300 pixels out and 282 pixels down! Why is that a problem? The screen real estate is limited (and not everyone uses big fancy monitors) And it's not that the content before that has something meaningful that justifies this change- most of it is white space! This doesn't look anything like a design for web interface. Here, check it out-

White space in GMail

White space in Reader

The real problem- Now I'm not typically known to complain about user interfaces, but the problem that I'm most worried about comes from some casual conversation with my friends currently employed at Google. What surprised me most was that each and every one of my Googler friends that I had a chance to talk about this, didn't like this change! And yet it is live. 

There are two possible inferences from this- either Google did conduct a usability study for these changes and found the most unique set of users that love this new UI and rest of us (by my casual survey ~99%) are now SOL. That seems highly improbable. The other possibility is that they didn't conduct a usability study, and as in the history of doing stealthy/creative launches, have a really big plan for all that white space. 

I don't know which one it really is the real issue, but either of these options are on a disturbing trend. 

If you understand this field better, or know why these changes make sense- go ahead and comment on this post and let the rest of us know. Otherwise help spread the word about this disappointing trend in usability changes.