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Comment by floathub | Hacker News Reader

I am genuinely impressed that you were gmail’s lead designer for _years_.

In the abstract, I understand how adoption and usability can turn on subtle and clever design decisions. The sum total of all these little things can definitely lead to a hockey stick uptake.

But I’m still lost on the OP “before” and “after” shots. Looks like the same info to me, just rearranged with different whitespace. Am I totally missing something fundamental?

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They are not before and after shots. These are both "after" shots, the first one of the inbox view and the second one of an email view. Click on the image to see the default gmail view for comparison.

I guess GP meant those before and after screenshots. I agree with them in that I also don't what the difference is. I also never used Inbox for more than 10 min. It's the same, just a bit "prettier" with the definition of "pretty" being "bigger and with more whitespace", which I don't necessarily agree with, at least for email.

If you click the pictures they change

No, that's basically what inbox was. More whitespace and less (hopefully irrelevant) information on the screen. There was also some extra functionality but I don't think this app implements it

Inbox has a lot of useful features with bundling and archiving.

This extensions seems to be just a skin on gmail that doesn't give any of the inbox functionality. Seems to just replicate that extra whitespace functionality only.

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