Blogger design team, please beat yourselves over the head with Donald Norman books

I've been using the new Blogger interface for two minutes, and while I had previously promised not to like it, now I have several definite reasons to not like it.  It's very nice to have that little "Revert to legacy Blogger" button there, but since I've had some education in human factors, I will take a look around first.

What they need to remember from Norman is the concept of Affordances, usable ones.  An affordance is something that the user can interact with, usually a control. A user interface for ordinary people needs to make the user's controls visible and understandable and usable, not hidden and obscure within the user interface.

Overall it seems their intention was to make a more mobile-friendly interface, cleaner-looking and less dense. Not simpler, because the set of user controls hasn't changed much. Some of the cleanliness has come at the cost of moving controls to sub-menus...such as Blockquote and Save.

They've changed the text boxes to only show a thin line at the bottom. Typing a post title feels viscerally precarious, like standing on the ridge of a roof, compared to the enclosed feeling of a fully outlined text box. Just what a writer needs when they're trying to put words together.

I'm also not a fan of the post thumbnails; which for an image-less post is an image of the first letter in the title, only in a different font, gray, and MUCH LARGER.

In the listing of Posts, the controls are all icons except for Edit, which you get to now by clicking on the title, and which I found only by guessing.

For the Labels chooser, they have hidden the full list of labels and have put in a search-based suggestion functionality, which updates with each new character typed. So if I type in the letter "s", it gives me a list of all of the labels that contain "s", starting with "accept and transcend". Typing "se" gets me a list that starts with "exercise" and ends with "serendipity" and "sewing". So I will often have to half-type the label I want, to get it far enough up the list that I can select it without having to scroll down to it. Or I can just ignore the suggestions, and type the whole thing myself.

Previously the listing was compactly given in a box, separated by commas. It was very difficult to accurately select them on a mobile device, for sure, but at least I could see them all, with a little scrolling.

On further use, observation, and investigation, I found that I could get the whole list of labels.  All I have to do is put in two or more labels, then a comma to indicate the end of the last one, then it will throw up the whole list, apparently believing that I am now getting serious about attaching labels to this particular post. In the scroll box, I can see seven labels at a time. I have one hundred and two.

It is also sometimes putting a recently removed label at the top of the list, since I've been experimenting with putting on and taking off labels. What else is it trying to think about for itself when I'm not looking?