What happened, Gmail?
uxplanet.org
uxplanet.org
Here's the feature I keep wishing for in Google: when I attach a file, it should let me rename the file. I want to store it on my compute with a name that's meaningful for me and to send it to someone with a name that's meaningful for them. Eg: I want to have cv_google.pdf for my copy of my CV that I'm sending to Google for a job application but I want to have them receive it as cv_tgb.pdf to know that it's from "tgb". Similarly, when I download a file I want to be able to rename it.
- I have notifications disabled for all but the important emails. So I respond to emails in time and I don't keep checking my phone anymore.
- Easy to read and discard emails. Especially promotions. I actually do check them - once a day and once a day only and then delete them all.
- Social/Updates ...etc are neatly organised. I check them during a downtime and not often. They don't alert me.
- Organising emails by trips are great. I can find all the relevant emails in one bundle.
- Absolutely love the GTD features - Marking as Done and Snoozing emails. My Inbox is always zero. I use that as pretty much a task manager as well.
Overall, classification of emails make emails actually usable for me. I used to be meticulous with creating email rules and filters in Outlook so I get to the ones I need to and ignore the rest for my sanity. Now it's done automagically and pretty spot on.
- Seeing things in the email list associated with the email without having to open them, like expected shipping dates, PDFs. I can click on those things directly in the list without having to open the email and hunt for them
- Being able to pin things. This also functions as a 'selective offline' - when I'm traveling I pin travel and other important emails. Or if I purchased a movie ticket months before I can pin that and easily press a button to retrieve it without having to search for it
One thing that worries me though is that not only is Gmail moving closer to Inbox (a good thing) but Inbox seems to be moving closer to Gmail...
For example on Inbox iOS there was a swipe down to dismiss email list or email which made it really easy to work one-handed. Now they've adopted the Gmail-style 'push into new page' which means you have to reach your thumb all the way up the screen to hit the back button instead of just swiping down on the email.
Case in point: I run a website for my town and some user actions are sent to me via SendGrid emails. Not a lot, but maybe one or two per day. I've made the email subject descriptive enough that I rarely need to open them to know what happened. I'm guessing that because it's a mailer from SendGrid and that I rarely open them, my email provider decided that they weren't important emails and stopped sending them to my inbox. When I figured it out a few days later and went to check the other tab, I found a couple messages had been sent of people wanting to purchase ad space that the email provider had also decided wasn't important enough to notify me of.
So now I have to check both tabs religiously (in reality I just turned it off) because I can never trust that I'm not missing something.
Been doing this kind of categorizing with filters since I discovered the feature and never looked back.
I've been using inbox for about a year or two now and this is my biggest complaint - you can't do a lot of poweruser stuff without going back to gmail! Once you set it up, inbox will do it (ex, setting up a filter in gmail filters in inbox as well), but there's no inbox interface of doing it. Other than that, it's great (it used to be relatively slow as well but either I've gotten used to it or they've sped it up).
Being on a somewhat flexible schedule on multiple sites, I like to know I'll be reminded of an important email when I get to the relevant site, which can be unpredictable sometimes.
I enabled some of the filters and it put an amazon update in with the spam so I missed my delivery. What else could you miss?
Fast forward an year later, I'm surprised how good it works. My inbox is filtered clean of all "secondary" email. You might have some false positives and you have to tell the system that Amazon deliveries go to Updates not Promotions etc. But I wouldn't want to go to the world before the categorizations.
The article has very good points, especially when it touches the issue of "hidden" mail, like the promotions tab: there are labels and tabs. There should be only one system, and no, don't hide things from the user at this level. When there's 17k mails in promotions, eating up 6GB alert them, let them know. (This ties back to how WordPress keeps hiding anything technical from users, which is also bad[^1])
Filtering on Gmail is outrageous, especially when you compare it to Sieve. No option to match on custom header, seriously?
Things like unprintable email is a bad joke. Unprintable? What if I connect to Gmail with mutt? It gives the sense of a false security.
I'm aware of all the arguments against email, but so far nobody could come up with a robust, reliable (see SMTP retries), async, world wide, federated solution, that even touches the level of email.
Here's a revolutionary idea: instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it.
[^1]: https://www.rarst.net/wordpress/technical-responsibility/
It also fundamentally breaks with what the user expects. The user expects their email to be theirs, to do with what they will. I know of no situation in which I would like an email which I specifically cannot print; I have no idea how I would explain it to my Grandfather.
And the people that do work around it in order to violate company policy can be dealt with here in meatspace.
Eg: HR -- "We didn't want you printing that sensitive email.... why did you go out of your way to print it?"
I'm not a GMail user, but can someone explains how this 'security' feature works? If a GMail user creates a 'secure' email and sends it to a non-GMail recipient (so it goes over SMTP/TLS), how is the DRM enforced at the other end. I know MS Outlook has DRM features.. but are they compatible with GMail's ?
Many organisations for whom this is an attractive feature, have long had policies around emailing sensitive information, instead links are emailed, and securing access to the information is handled by the application. If the link is forwarded to the wrong person, all they can see is a login screen.
Photograph your screen with your phone.
It’s still just a «please don’t print».
The "email was meant to be kept simple" can't be stated in isolation. Many suffering recipients of email see the outside world stuffing their inbox as making "email complicated". They can't control how others misuse email.
Paul Graham explained that email has become overwhelming for him and his peers.[1]
What's your recommendation for their pain points with the current email system?
[1] from 7m29s to 11m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9ITLdmfdLI&feature=youtu.be...
Many like you definitely exist but your "pure 100% communications only" usage isn't what the Gmail enhancements (that many dislike) were trying to solve.
The blog author, Avi Ashkenazi, wrote:
>From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy.
There is overlap between the non-communication features that Avi Ashkenazi mentioned and what Paul Graham is talking about. PG recommends creating a new and different protocol. Avi Ashkenazi is saying don't try to shoehorn things like "tasks" into the Gmail UI/UX because it makes it complicated. Google/Alphabet apparently is working from a different philosophical base: many people use Gmail as the central dashboard so let's put everything there.
Better water exists, but it's not much better than the usual one. You can use water for many things, but it doesn't matter whose supply you're using.
E-mail must be kept that way: there's nothing to invent in terms of email itself. You can only invent on top of it. It's just like HTTP: HTTP/2 exists, but it doesn't change the idea of HTTP, it only evolves it.
Again, stop breaking it.
It's a matter of a different perspective and "breaking it" is in the eye of the beholder.
For many end users of email (and Google Inc's point-of-view apparently), it's the other users sending me emails that's "breaking it" beyond SMTP's original design intentions.
>Use CalDAV for tasks sync,
E.g. it's the other users who send "tasks" and "appointments" inside a freeform email instead of strictly using CalDAV. Their abuses of email has broken the SMTP system. If overloaded email usage by other humans who don't categorize what they send into strict protocols such as CalDAV is a fact of life, the Google response is to add some complexity to the UX/UI to let users conveniently copy paste it into the sidebars for Tasks and Calendar. Google may be wrong (as the blog post argues) but I think it's worth entertaining the idea that the multipurpose usage of email has already "broken email".
For many people, your suggestion of putting 17k of emails into a single namespace alongside other important emails is not acceptable. They want a UX/UI to make a first crude pass at filtering it into a hierarchy. This does have a negative side effect if "hiding" it from some users who don't notice it's there.
Settings >> Inbox type >> Unread first
Suddenly all that junk previously ignored is prominent again. Within a week I had unsubscribed from 95% of unwanted correspondence. Was quite liberating to have a real inbox again.
I used to use it for awhile. Then I got some AWS credit so I setup Amazon Work Mail.
Seriously, migration is as easy as pointing your MX records to them and running their import tool. It takes ten minutes (I thought switching off Gmail would take ages, but no, literal ten minutes).
I think the problem here is that this is a Gmail-specific, non-standard feature, meaning there is no specification that allows to implement this in a reliable, cross-client way.
However, Fastmail is working on something similar with JMAP.
I found this earlier HN comment to be really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16372835
They are! [1]
"It really is coming in JMAP! Come along to IETF in London to have a play, or I'll be pushing out links to updated JMAP Proxy in the next couple of weeks and you can play with it there :)"
Once they've got JMAP nailed down, they'd just need to support Gmail's native API [2] for retrieving rich message data for their import process.
When I bought my domain, it was before Gmail was as ubiquitous as it is today. My email was hosted by a mom and pop ISP. Then I moved to Gmail and later to Fastmail.
Having my own domain is inexpensive, fun, and lets me maintain email portability over time. Namecheap is a good, easy registrar. I moved to them a while back and was impressed at their documentation and help during that domain transfer.
I think that, similar to cell phone numbers, people get very attached to these contact points and changing them creates anxiety. I happen to have changed both email address and phone number (after five years) recently and I think it makes sense to do once in a while. Otherwise these things become seemingly permenant identifiers and I have enough of those already (:
Me, my spouse, and my teenaged kid all have our own domains. They're all hosted at Fastmail under a group account and we all can have as many additional addresses tied to our regular accounts as we want.
It does cost a bit more ($15/year/domain at Gandi, my preferred registrar) than just paying Fastmail directly and using one of their domains or sticking with the costs-no-money Gmail offering but it's been worth it in unexpected ways. My kid, for instance, is following in the "family business footsteps" and doing IT work for small clients. Since he had his own domain, he can have prospective clients e-mail him at "consulting@hisdomain.tld" My spouse uses a bazillion aliases for spam and inbound e-mail filtering without tipping off the spammers to the underlying e-mail address by having to use the + notation.
Someday, when my kid strikes out fully on his own, he'll be able to take his domain with him to wherever he wants (even host it on Gmail, if he prefers) without losing any of his addresses or other contacts. My domain has been around for over two decades and has been hosted in easily 20 different places, but my main e-mail address has remained the same.
It's nice and worth the money.
runbox.com (cheapest for >1 user)
rackspace.com/email-hosting
zoho.com/mail
www.gandi.net (free w/ domain registration)
Email isn't a religion and originalism isn't a meaningful framework for analysis.
Email started as a simple answer to a simple question, and has evolved from there to answer increasing hard questions. The original inventors totally failed to anticipate many important realities about email (most significantly, spam, but also encryption and signing), and email has evolved to deal with that.
You're free to keep using email as you believe it should be used, but you have no right to insist that other people hold back in adopting new ways of doing things that they feel suits them better.
Over the past, what... 30 years? - e-mail remains what it had been in the first place: a protocol for exchanging messages.
You're still sending text. You're still attaching links to your messages if you'd like to send a large file. You're still trying to keep concise in your comm.
What have evolved, exactly? Sans encryption - that's not really a "hard question". Gmail's a great spam-free platform, but it doesn't add anything revolutionary.
The difference is (a) those messages started to measure in the hundreds or thousands per day, not 5 of them at most like in the eighties, (b) people started using it for all kinds of work collaboration and organization. Not just some academics exchanging ideas.
PS: please do not say "Hangouts", as Hangouts are only loosely integrated with Gmail. These are two separate systems and it does seem they are still unsure if these two should be merged together.
Several mail programs have added integrated calendars and notifications, email snoozing, labels, classification into buckets, context, and so on -- including basics like search.
And of course there are the apps and plugins -- e.g. Asana within Gmail and the like.
If those don’t sound revolutionary today, it’s only because Gmail revolutionized things so hard that everyone had to jump on board.
But in terms of proper e-mail usage: be it through MS Exchange, University campuses, corporate servers - they made no difference. Everyone already had enough space there anyway, and spam filters <mostly> worked - as they had enough email volume to detect attack. And they still use these systems.
Lol my 100mb before the uni (National top 30 research) switched to gmail was definitely plenty of space. And google should have just hired the $7/hr freshman that configured spamassassin instead of wasting all that money on Postini. You’re funny; don’t quit your day job though.
Things might be less bad nowadays, I don't know. What I know about MS Exchange is enough to keep away from it.
That's the perspective of most people. They are not power users, they don't have the technical ability to deal with complicated email systems, and they just want something free that works well.
Your concept of "proper" email usage doesn't cover most of the population.
It was also a nicer web interface than the competition -- so nice that it managed to get a lot of people to use it instead of desktop mail clients, which were the norm at the time.
Deleting an email in a thread:
Find a small button. Click. Find "delete". It is in the middle of the list. This is just simply stupid. Click.
BTW you should delete your email. IIRC after 6 month (?) the government doesn't need a warrant to access it.
Which country?
Funny when you look at Chrome where they don't protect saved passwords to avoid giving users a "false sense of security and encouraging dangerous behavior"[1], which seems to be a valid argument here too
What percentage of users would even know what a custom header is, much less ever attempt to match one?
Is that what one would call a basic feature lacking from Gmail, for its lack to guarantee a "seriously?"?
Gmail is not just simple users, it's also corporate who's paying for it.
You're only offering non constructive criticism. Gmail is light years ahead of any other email client I have tried so far.
If you want to get off of Gmail the client, you can use an IMAP client like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, etc. There are quirks with how the IMAP protocol's concepts get mapped to Gmail's concepts though.
If you want to get off of Gmail the provider, that's a different story. There are many free and paid providers, but there's still a large effort to switch since you have to ask people to update your email address and probably keep the old one around (and forwarding to the new one) for a long time. If you have your own domain that's backended by Gmail, this is a lot easier.
I switched away from Gmail at the start of 2018. So far everything has gone smoothly. My new email provider (Fastmail) has a tool to import all emails from another provider, which ran overnight. I forward all mail from my Gmail address to my new address. One feature of Gmail which makes it particularly easy to switch away from is that it's free, so I can keep my Gmail account open indefinitely to forward mail.
Asking people to update my address hasn't been a huge problem. Even when they email me at the old one, I still get their messages.
Fastmail, self hosted iredmail, protonmail, etc., are fine providers.
Geary, rainloop, macos mail, k9, are very nice clients.
Have you actually tried any alternative clients, before you made this comment?
For work, I use Thunderbird because I need Enigmail for PGP and I absolutely hate it.
Inbox does an almost perfect job of catching spam and sorting my mail. It has saved me many hours over the years.
I have to agree with them.
Also, pretty weak rhetoric to suggest someone hasn't tried the alternatives. Can I assume you haven't tried Protonmail because I can't understand how someone can say email without search is better than Gmail.
To me, it's downright scary that someone would want Google telling them what is important in their own mailbox. Personal responsibility bad, Hand-holding good, apparently.
In Gmail you can (un)label email as being important, which will then train an algorithm just like a spam filter. Besides that, it will learn to recognise email you reply to often as being important.
I very much like this feature; I set up the Gmail app on iOS to only send me push notifications for important mail. For me that strikes a good balance between no distractions and not missing out on important email.
This is not that: it's you, giving a giant personal information sponge, a bigger tap.
This features makes the experience better for users without having to give any additional information.
Yes, you can (supposedly) train the "importance" filter, but how many people will do that?
Those "objective filters" prevent me from sending email from home (I have to relay through a non-residential IP).
I receive about a dozen spam email per day (with occasional surges and lapses). My server accepts everything, and a simple local filter from my mail user agent (Evolution or Thunderbird, mainly) let few through, and false positives are very rare.
I'm not sure why the giant providers need to work any differently.
- 57 rejected messages designated as spam by SpamAssassin
- 137 greylisted messages, most of which will end up being spam as those addresses which I communicate with regularly will be in the whitelist.
- 181 connection attempts blocked at the gate due to protocol violations (most of them due to fake HELO, usually trying to connect using my own server's FQDN)
- 144 delivery attempts blocked at RCPT due to the use of blacklisted recipient addresses. This is why using recipient-specific sender addresses makes sense when communicating with commercial, organisational or governmental institutions: it makes it possible both to track down who leaked or sold addresses to spammers as well as to block those addresses entirely.
This domain has been handling mail for close to 23 years now, the server is used daily by about 8 people, it also forwards mail for a few others.
I generally don't see more than one or two spam messages per week in my actual INBOX.
I also get no more than 1-2 spam message per week in my inbox.
http://onoffswitch.net/fogbugz-priority-prediction-naive-bay...
Filtering into "email that I want a push notification for" versus "email that I'll read in a few hours when I check" makes sense. What I don't get is people who are using this as a way to divide into emails they'll read and emails they won't read. Given that genuine spam is so rare these days, any email that gets as far as you gmail "unimportant" inbox is an email that you in some sense requested; if your inbox is full of mailing lists and newsletters that you don't read, wouldn't unsubscribing be a better route than filtering them out?
It's a matter of degree of course, but scary seems too strong a word.
How can that same technique not be used for marking important emails?
Conversely, if someone I've never exchanged emails with before, but who got my details through a third party wants to discuss a business opportunity, is that spam?
If you define spam narrowly as "unsolicited", then sure, it's somewhat objective (although even then, you have to work what was solicited in ways other than an initial email). But there's quite a bit of subjectivity involved in the more useful and generally accepted definition.
"Objective filters" (by which I assume you mean "rule based") can easily be worked around by the people trying to get through the filter. All you gotta do is figure out the rule and bam, you are back in again.
Sure it might work for your tiny little family domain name with your tiny 10 mailbox email server. No spammer gives a crap about you. But when you are on the scale of gmail, you will have a lot of people whose entire purpose in life is getting through your spam filters. "Objective filters" turn into a continual game of whack-a-mole. Put in a rule, wait half a day until somebody works around that rule, put in another rule.... repeat ad nauseam.
"Objective Filters" don't scale at all. They might filter out the riff-raff script kiddies but anybody whose livelihood is based on getting past your "objective filters" will easily overcome them.
Also, the wording was "... and what can wait for later", which doesn't sound like spam was meant - I don't think people keep their spam messages and read through them later, e.g. over the weekend. :)
I agree that spam detection is not an exact science, and that it is in fact quite subjective. It's also quite valuable!
It's not. This is how and why people keep missing actually important email, because friend X changed their email address for reasons, but they are not in the contact list, so it must be spam/phishing.
So yeah, hand holding is good, because to be honest, I don't get up on a Saturday morning and say "oh boy I can't wait to setup my email filters, right after I tweak my Arch Linux install and add a few more lines to my .vimrc!"
This sense of being looked down upon for relinquishing control over things that to be honest, I don't care that much about is just annoying after a time.
I see it as "can someone tie my shoelaces for me please?" level of non-responsibility. And it scares me.
I loved driving stick shift, but I’m not sorry to see it go either.
We don't want to go back to doing email like our parents did (except we do) so its time to use the cool new shit. Ah, Big Vendor with cool new shit, is cool with the kids. In slips the mickey, and the rest is devolutionary disco.
We really do need to return to using email properly. All these social networks were already there; we just forgot how to build them ourselves, and a return to using email for ones contacts, strictly, can be an immensely rewarding experience, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to support this theory.
Simply learning how to send and use email, the bcc:, the cc:, the x-headers:, etc. If we'd put a bit of effort into this, we'd have a fallback replacement for the behemoth maw, threatening to swallow us all in its dark abyss.
You probably have a much lower volume of email than the suffering email users who want AI algorithms to help them manage their inbox.
The analogy would be something like "Pagerank". You can't lecture a web surfer that he shouldn't leave the importance of web pages to an algorithm like Pagerank. Instead, he should read the 1 billion pages himself to determine which is most important to his search query.
There are not 1 billion emails in an inbox but any number of messages greater than a few hundred is the equivalent in information unmanageability.
It's an inescapable math problem. If you only have ~16 waking hours a day, you may only be able to realistically dedicate ~4 hours to reading and responding to emails. Your allocation of that finite time is a zero-sum game. The math problem: the outside world can stuff more unimportant emails in your inbox than you have the human capability to read and curate. Therefore you must have a robot "reader" assist you.
The original programmer for Gmail back in 2001 was Paul Buchheit. The busy people (like his boss Larry Page) with overflowing email inboxes were the first users giving him feedback on how to make it work better for their productivity.
Auto filtering and smart threading are examples of "artificial intelligence" (so to speak) applied to email. Those features came from internally dogfooding Gmail before public release April 1 2004. Later, they added a feature called "Priority inbox" based on machine learning.[1]
What makes you believe Gmail isn't meant to help filter overflowing emails on behalf of the user?
[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...
excerpt: "Many Gmail users receive tens or hundreds of mails per day. The Priority Inbox attempts to alleviate such information overload by learning a per-user statistical model of importance, and ranking mail by how likely the user is to act on that mail."
It allows me to have notifications only for stuff I probably care about. It helps cut down on the crap. At the same time, no e-mail is urgent. If things were urgent, contact me some other way. I check my non-important email roughly daily but no guarantees.
My point being that important e-mail doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be close enough that I probably care about the notifications, and don't miss too many notifications.
How about the thought that your phone broke common UI behaviour and not your software which needs to adapt to a new screen culture.
I'm sure very soon Inbox will support iPhone X. But there are many other problems in Inbox which I see more important like Unspam emails without Gmail.
btw. I've read once in a German Blog that using on iPhone the app Outlook as a frontend for Inbox works really well. Never tried it myself but it seems this Frankenstein setup works better than expected.
Ok, sure…
> and not your software which needs to adapt to a new screen culture.
Why not? UI paradigms change all the time, and software usually keeps up if it wants to stay relevant. How is this different?
This has led me to think Inbox is on its way out. Lack of updates is the classic Google move prior to killing a product.
Any time an app takes forever to update to a new apple screen resolution is a good indicator the app is on its way out.
I mean, think about it.... if you were all-in on your app, wouldn't the highest priority fixes on your backlog be "get the damn thing to run in the native resolution of your target device"?
No, no one likes to categorize emails, this is work for someone else or for power users that's not a case for GMail.
> A tool to help users fix mistakes they’ve made, such as sending someone the wrong email, or spelling something incorrectly.
For a long time Telegram didn't want to introduce this feature since if you sent something this should be in other's inbox. If someone can modify your inbox than you won't be able to trust that some random email won't disappear.
> Allowing users to handle their business better through Gmail (e.g. sign documents, approve things, review things).
Uh, guy just want to put everything to GMail while claiming that this is not an "innovation".
> Allowing users to design their emails in a better way.
Do you want to receive emails from your lawyer in comic sans? There is a reason why FB, Slack, Telegram, etc don't allow you to style your text easily.
> Letting users know if someone read their presentation and what parts interested them (DocSend).
Breaking fundamental flow of an email. No one will see if you read and no one will be upset. There are a reason why slack dosen't have read status.
GMail probably have a lot of problems now, but (sorry) this all just unprofessional judgment.
I did a side-by-side comparison of the old UI and the new UI and I've changed my stance. The old one is a better "email" UI, but google is trying to mature the email experience.
A big problem here is that email showing it's age. Google is eager to hide less common tools behind menus. They want to delete all of the old "manual" buttons/tools so their smart filters can take over. It wont work. The truth is everyone likes email because it's fairly consistent, but we're forever trapped in 90's tech.
Instant messengers have transformed the way that we communicate, but email hasn't caught up. Maybe... it shouldn't.
Email, at this point, is infrastructure. There is no need for an "experience" with it.
It's more intrusive as a gui than the old one.
Use them, utilize other webmails, even run it localhost, like rainloop; desktop clients, like geary, evolution, claws, thunderbird; command line, like mutt.
Don't let the gmail interface drive the way you want to deal with email.
Using those clients is sub-standard with google's imap implementation, and switching between them is more painful due to how each one handles googles "labels not folders" quirk
The problem is that it might as well disappear at any time. It is already disabled by default for new accounts, and you need to change 2 different settings to enable it.
Unfortunately nothing is truly stopping Google to pull a Slack move and close the gateways... unless the amount of IMAP/SMTP users are significantly higher, than we know, or that those users are tech influencers Google don't dare to loose.
However the right side menu for Tasks, Calendar and etc. is nice, I like having them in one place instead of keeping multiple diff tabs open.
I'm not sure if this lag effect is intentional or a performance problem, maybe React instead of Angular could help :D
Both issues are also true for the Gmail application on Android.
For personal stuff, I think WhatsApp, Messenger, iMessages are clear winners. 90% of my emails seem to be marketing I'll never read or notifications I ignore. I try my best to unsubscribe, but email really needs maintenance to work nicely.
For work almost everything is Slack. Sales team and a few others still seem to use email for some reason. Email is vital for communication with clients and it's pretty good for a big announcement where you can then choose to "reply all" or "reply", not sure Slack solves that nicely with threads. Also email seems to be used for anything considered too important for Slack, but I can't see any good reason why it should be that way.
When you boil it all down, it looks like a lot of use of email is for legacy reasons, i.e. some people still insist on using it. There is legitimate usefulness over other options when it comes to communicating between companies though. Even if Slack figured out a way to fix that, they'd probably require the reciever to be paying for Slack.
I guess the ability to send a stranger a message is email's weakness and it's strength. Nothing out there has solved that yet.
i dislike phone calls in general for all but the most time-sensitive and/or intimate conversations. i get a bit anxious on the phone and i don't like being essentially blocked for the duration of the call.
i dislike sms because i don't have an iphone, so i cannot respond using a full sized keyboard without using workarounds like pushbullet, which i don't feel like setting up for the small number of people who insist on using sms.
i don't love communicating via email but i would contest the claim that it is a legacy technology on the basis that it does not have a clear successor.
there is no modern service that matches the ubiquity of email; the penetration is unequaled even by the likes of facebook. i would also point out that (personal) email addresses provide highly stable means of communicating with infrequent contacts. while people's phone numbers change over time, people seem to accumulate personal email addresses and at least forward the old ones to their main account. if i got someone's personal email address five or even ten years ago, i have a pretty good chance of reaching them today. on the other hand, i assume that phone numbers that i haven't used for a couple years are dead links. with messaging apps, you don't always have a clear indication of whether the person currently has the app installed with notifications enabled.
Anyone else been bitten by this?
I use gmail mainly for business related mails and the default reply-all makes a lot sense - almost all the time other recipients ( managers, clients etc) are there to be kept in loop. If you forgot and just reply to it, then you have send the same mail again - or worse you never notice it.
I guess it boils down to your default usage of email; I've never had an email client before Inbox that does 'reply all' by default.
Once information enters my premises, I do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not sharing it with others or violating any NDAs. In particular, you do not get to define the media and methods I use to access, consume, and save information. You just get to send me a binary number containing information, and it's your choice whether you want to do that or not. That's it.
If you don't agree to me having personal freedom, don't send me information and don't contact me.
Edit: nvm I found a video explaining it. Probably never missed it bevause I use a separate calebdar and never use Google for that.
Inbox looks like a jumbled mess to me, with randomly sized images and pre-rendered images, and it makes me scroll a lot more.
Annoyingly, the new UI is slightly less dense than before, but it's still much better than Inbox.
If I had more emails, or more emails I actually had to address by replies, it might be different. I never noticed the "images" in inbox though. Are those for things like purchases or travels that it renders differently? My emails just look like subject lines, with about the same density in inbox as in classic gmail (Quick check: An inbox email on desktop is a 32px div with 6px padding, while a gmail email is a 39px table row - so quick estimate is 5px more per email for inbox)
A quick an dirty screenshot-on-my-current-machine shows inbox compact emails at 60px vertical, vs 50 for the new gmail. All of the difference seems to be whitespace, the fonts are more or less identical. There's extra waste for "Today" and "This month", and with a couple of expanded pictures, I can't even fit 10 emails vertically on my screen (MB 12"). Gmail shows 20 emails in the same space just fine.
It's quite possible that if you have just the right volume of email, the Inbox format is perfect. It's also possible that most people don't mind scrolling. Me though, I like to see as much as I possibly can at a glance.
I just want an as simple as possible list of emails. Basically the compact view in current gmail, sorted by unread - not by some automatic folders or anything similar.
If I have to do something at a specific time I'll create a calendar entry. If it's a newsletter that I don't care about I'll unsubscribe. Email for me should be a list of messages, nothing more, nothing less.
Same goes for other goole services, such as google play music. Everything is super large and with a ton of padding, and you can't see more than a few songs in a list because the elements are so huge.
Hmm maybe there is a fix: https://www.msoutlook.info/question/copies-in-important-fold...
My only issue is that the sidebar expands when I mouse over it. Does anyone know if this can be fixed so just the icons show?
https://www.lifewire.com/outlook-pst-files-size-limit-117334...
(NB: I’m being facetious, and agree with you - this, 15ish years ago, is really the last time I remember needing to sort by size)
An UX that is great for your mom and mine might be bad for you and I.
I noticed that on one of my project that got on Hacker News and Hackaday, then got viral on reddit and media and such a week or so later. It has both a github and a couple of videos linked on the site. What I noticed from my rudimentary Cloudflare log and Youtube analytics was that the HN crowd read and looked at the github, but most didn't watch the video. The normies crowd watched the video, but most didn't read. To me, it was kinda funny.
I think that's part of the crisis that GNOME 3 suffered lately. I seriously tried GNOME 3 for a while and their macOS approach - simplify, trying to make good choices by default - genuinely sucks for me. I want to see my options, don't hide them away from me. I want to be able to make choices. The problem that the GNOME 3 team doesn't realize is that their users aren't made up of majority normies. They are the ones who are savvy enough to install a Linux distro on their desktop. They are the ones that will go great lengths to customize something to make it work exactly the way they wanted. And GNOME 3 fails to deliver that [1].
At first when I worked on my project, I wanted to create something very simple that "just works." As time went by, it turned out to me many of my users, the ones that stick and support my project aren't the ones that just install and forget. They read the docs, wiki and the source code to tease out what I was trying to do. So I realized having a great, updated wiki is a very valuable asset. It takes great pain to do it, but it is worth it.
The problem with project that are extremely popular like Gmail is that you tend to carter for the mass. But are they loyal? Are they the ones that actually use and love your product? Are they the ones that influence other people's choices? I think those are the questions worth asking and considering when designing products.
They need a tool to make the source of the spam stop spamming them, not a tool to hide this. Sweeping the dirt under that carpet is not an actual solution or fix.
> Google are the creators of one of the best design systems every created in tech, Material Design.
Beside this, the loading indicator in material design gives me ... anxiety. its animation is so uneven ... (like the windows 10 indicator which is even worse. i can’t believe this kind of irregular animations have been so widely accepted)
and i can't help but wonder if these are the reasons why the new GMail UI doesn't work well for this article's reviewer: the GMail app team doesn't really have a clear design inspiration to work from either.
i never liked "Material Design" as a name either. they might as well have called it "stuff design" because, you know, it's designed to look like "stuff."
Never a fan of material design.. seriously, Google is NOT good at design. Period. I hoped, in this Gmail iteration, Google would finally take the plunge and kill the flat icons and minimalist design and once for all. It's quite the opposite unfortunately. It got flatter and uglier. All so plain and washed out, one doesn't know what he should look at first.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/12/17227974/google-gmail-des...
Font and icon color is too dark. Needs more whitespace too.
> one doesn't know what he should look at first.
Pot, meet kettle.
Why designers don't use background to highlight active items, while keeping text/icons high contrast, instead of making everything unreadable, and using black color to barely highlight what's focussed, is beyond me.
It's all extremely gimicky, especially all those useless animations of huge areas of the page.
I never understood what it's for, aside from commenting on screens - and it does shitty job at that too - you start typing a comment but you can't move the fucking comment box around so that it doesn't cover the part you're commenting - so you close the comment box, to see and reopen and your unfinished comment is gone. Instead of focussing on important stuff like this, they create shitty gimmicks.
It's almost satirical how it markets itself compared to how bad it is.
And whatever this is it certainly seems inspired by InVision.