A little preamble here, I am a die-hard UX Designer. My visual design skills are a bit weak. I am better at systems design and user research.
However, the new Gmail App for Android, really, really bothers me from a design point of view.
Specifically, the header.
A few things:
• The search field border includes the hamburger menu and the account switcher menu.
From a UX point of view, these are three separate elements and should not be lumped into one visual space.
• The account switcher (picture) is not reachable when using the phone one handed. It also breaks up the navigation into two separate pieces. We can make some assumptions to why this changed... People were not seeing the account switching functionality in the hamburger menu. The hamburger menu limited the number of accounts that could be shown, etc.
• Finally, the Hamburger menu inside the search field. Along with that, Google is breaking their own Material Design System with this flat design and not showing layers.
So what can we do about it?
Quickly throwing together an alternative, I came up with this. However, it needs more depth as how does the account switcher work compared to the menu. So this isn't final, but a first iteration.