Gmail was laughing too hard to care about the users

Gmail’s Mic Drop prank from last week is a classic case of some inside joke becoming a lot less funny when trying to tell it to people who don’t know any of the context. The big difference, as Silicon Valley is fond of talking about, is a matter of scale.

In case you missed it, Gmail added a new button that let users “Mic Drop” on the email chain. This added a GIF of a Minion dropping a mic AND muted the email conversation. So you’d never see any of the replies. TechCrunch has a great wrap-up of the prank and Andy Baio’s reasoning why this is a big failure.

While some people laughed at the joke there were others who found it to be annoying or even damaging. Depending on how much you believe on the internet there were people who lost jobs or clients because of accidentally triggering the Mic Drop.

So could this have been prevented? Has anything like this happened before? How could some brainiacs at Google mess this up so badly?

The answers are “yes,” “of course,” and “they thought they were the users.”

In the excellent Design for Real Life, by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher, there’s an analysis of Facebook’s Year in Review feature. The feature showcased all of the great moments from the past year and gathered them into a gallery. If these images were well-liked, they should all be happy moments, right?

In Eric Meyer’s case, that was far from the truth. The Year in Review showcased a picture of his daughter who had passed away earlier in the year. Facebook clearly had made some assumptions about the user. According to Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher these were:

1. The user had a great year.
2. The user wants to relive their year.
3. The user wants to share their year.

The problem was that if any of these assumptions weren’t true for the user this messaging could be annoying or hurtful, such as it was for Eric Meyer.

Fortunately, the people at Facebook took the feedback to heart and have improved the Year in Review feature dramatically. Gone are the assumptions that your previous year was full of giddy awesomeness and it’s offered up in a more neutral way.

When looking at the Mic Drop feature we can use the same lens to come up with the assumptions behind it:

1. The user knows the full effect of the button.
2. The user wants to end a conversation.
3. The user’s conversation isn’t about anything important.
4. The user knows the other person thinks that Minions are hilarious.
5. The user is sure the other person will be OK without any follow-up.

When these are all listed out it becomes clear that this is a very specific set of assumptions. For the vast majority of the users of this product, and there are oh so many, these wouldn’t hold true. This is inside joke territory.

One situation does seem to emerge where this feature would make sense. This is something that would be funny in a group that has near constant communication with each other. A Mic Drop would be totally fine if it’s one of several email threads going on inside of a group.

In that situation the Mic Drop would be a funny way to use a useful tool. Announcing with a GIF that you’re done with this conversation. It’s run its course, people are now posting cat GIFs, and you’re calling it quits. But you’ll be talking to them all more in other email threads and around the office.

In other words, the likely mode of conversation of a team inside of Google.

When this same joke gets released to the rest of the world, with many people using email in a different way, it’s easy to see that it wouldn’t be that funny or useful for anyone to use intentionally. For those who accidentally use it it can be a total mess.

And the kicker? In their blog post about it, the Gmail team didn’t see this coming. Emphasis here is mine.

We didn’t anticipate accidental clicks: “Send + Mic Drop” was too close to other send buttons (“Send” as well as “Send & Archive”), which caused confusion.

Let’s look at that again.

We didn’t anticipate accidental clicks

So not only were the users not considered in this prank, but any concern about user error and recovery isn’t there either.

To give credit to the Gmail team, they can’t be that bad. This is hopefully an awkward way of them trying to cover up their mistake.

If the Gmail team really did take accidental clicks into account and they had that list of assumptions to think about it’s doubtful that they would have ever pushed that feature. It would’ve been totally fine to leave it as a blog post.

Google being Google I’m sure they’ll try again for April Fools next year. I just hope that they take Facebook’s lead and do a better job considering the effect of their prank.

And if they could do it without including a Minion that’d be even better.