First Impressions:
Google Inbox
The mothership has seen fit to furnish me with an invite, so I have spent some time exploring Google’s new take on email to see what all the fuss is about.
Material Design
Far and away the best part of Inbox is its implementation of Google’s Material Design guidelines. Material Design brings together many common user experience principles, wrapping them in a gorgeous aesthetic paradigm favouring paper-like layering and natural animations.
Material Design has become the core of Google’s new product strategy, and they’ve been slowly rolling out design updates to existing products. It’s time-consuming because Material Design isn’t just a pleasant veneer, it’s a re-thinking of how we interact with their apps.
That same notion of re-thinking a fundamental aspect of our digital lives is what led to Inbox.
Inbox Zero
Most people use their email inboxes as a repository for all their emails. But if you look at the word itself — inbox — you realize that it’s intended to be a temporary holding spot, not a permanent stockpile. The “inbox zero” philosophy isn’t new, but it’s only since the release and widespread adoption of Mailbox that it’s begun to gain serious traction.
For those unfamiliar with it, inbox zero is a system of processing emails that sees the inbox returned to its original purpose: an actionable list. When an email arrives, there are only so many possible outcomes:
- You read it and want to keep it
- You read it and don’t want to keep it
- You have to follow up in some way
When you process emails, anything that you’ve read and want to keep gets archived. This is easy in most mail systems (except Exchange, where archiving is an entirely different concept). Gmail, iCloud, Outlook.com, etc. all have a one-click Archive button that sends email to a permanent repository, where it can be accessed whenever needed without cluttering up your inbox.
The result is an inbox that only ever contains items that require your attention — no newsletters, no conversations from two months ago, no distracting clutter.
If an email doesn’t need to be kept, it is deleted immediately. If any sort of follow-up is required, the email remains in the inbox until it’s dealt with. Once you’ve replied (or whatever else), the conversation is archived or deleted as necessary.
Google Inbox accomplishes what any good mail client that follows this philosophy should: it feels clean, uncluttered, and accessible.
Google Inbox
Inbox adopts the inbox zero philosophy whole-heartedly, and borrows some smart concepts from Mailbox — like snoozing — to assemble the next generation of email.
As a happy adoptee of the inbox zero workflow and an avid Mailbox user, I was very curious to see what Google’s engineers saw as the next step.
Focus
Inbox takes things many steps beyond Mailbox because it actively organizes and parses your emails.
The underlying notion is that many emails contain only a small, crucial core of useful information. Instead of making you open and scan those emails, Inbox extracts and displays the key elements right in your inbox so you can fly through email processing.
The principle is great, especially for things like travel or purchase receipts where seeing just the estimated delivery date and an image is a perfect simplification.
An important note on this: Inbox is merely a sophisticated layer on top of your Gmail data, and the full emails can always be opened if you want to see them in their original form. Having the crucial details displayed this way is simply a matter of presentation, and it’s a change that definitely speeds up email processing for busy inboxes.
Inbox is merely a sophisticated layer on top of your Gmail data
Done vs. Read
Instead of archiving processed mail, Inbox has a button called “Done” that performs nearly the same action.
Unfortunately, Inbox’s Done list is more limited than the Archive or All Mail view in Gmail. In the Done view, emails are sorted by when you marked them as “done” rather than when they arrived, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself…except that you have no options to sort emails by any other means.
In other words, if you want to use the Done list to see archived emails in the order they arrived, you’re out of luck.
Similarly (and unlike Mailbox), an email marked as “done” does not have its read status changed from unread to read, so if you’re like me and hate having a bunch of emails marked unread, you don’t get the same convenience.
This runs even deeper, as Google has actually removed the ability to manually change an email’s read state. Opening it marks it as read, but there’s no way to mark it as unread again, or mark emails as read without opening them.
Theoretically, this points to a depreciation of the whole concept of read states — which I would be fine with relinquishing in favour of “done” vs “inbox” / not done — but that isn’t the case. Read states are still tracked, so the inability to interact with them is bizarre.
Many of us used read states as an analogue for whether or not we have finished processing an email. Now that there’s an explicit “done” system, Google had two options: merge the two concepts or keep them separate. The former is the more logical solution for those of us who used read states to mark status, but for everyone else with a different workflow the change would presumably be jarring.
Google appears to have opted for the more widely compatible solution, which I can respect. Except that by removing the ability to toggle read state, they break the workflow for everyone else anyway…so why not just remove read states?
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that it’s a consequence of maintaining 1:1 compatibility with standard Gmail while still pushing people to disregard read states in favour of the new system.
In the meantime, read states seem to exist as a vestigial and basically useless bit of metadata that only serves to point out the obvious without connecting it to actual email workflow.
Bundles
On top of the focused presentation of an email’s core info, Inbox also builds on the categorized inboxes that were added to Gmail.
These collections, called Bundles, display similar emails together, like smart labels. Automatic categories are waiting for you when you open Inbox, including Travel, Purchases, Finance, Social, Updates, Forums, and Promos. These cannot be changed. You’re encouraged to create your own bundles as well, which can help you organize emails from certain groups of people, for example.
Categories were not particularly well received when added to Gmail because they seemed very similar to labels but less flexible — you couldn’t create your own and they only filtered email in your inbox, so you couldn’t use them to display archived messages. Bundles appear to be running into many of the same issues.
Concerningly, emails that are filtered into certain bundles may never actually land in your Inbox — they get marked as “done” automatically — so you don’t even see them unless you check your bundle views regularly. This is very disorienting and can pose serious problems if not communicated more clearly.
Not only that, but the distinction between bundles and labels is very vague. Unlike Gmail’s categories, you can create your own bundles, and they display all relevant mail from your archive as well as your inbox, but exactly how they differ from labels remains open to interpretation.
My best guess is that bundles replace categories and will eventually replace labels as well. In the meantime, it’s unclear what benefits bundles bring to the table for heavy users of labels.
On top of that, certain functionality seems to conflict in unexpected ways. For example, if you pin some bundled emails (more on that later) then they no longer appear bundled together in the Inbox view.
These are no doubt simple beta issues, but Google has a lot of work to do in differentiating bundles and clarifying how their usage should differ from labels, or if they’re meant to replace them.
Reminders
Google is terrible at consolidating services.
Hangouts, which was supposed to unify their messaging, was joined by yet another Messenger app in Android 4.4, ostensibly to offer a simple messaging alternative. Why not simplify Hangouts and call it Messenger if that was the concern? What’s simple about adding another app that does the same thing?
Inbox itself is not what I’m criticizing with this point — it may be built on top of Gmail, but it’s a very different product. What I’m referring to is the Reminders system built into it.
Reminders is the often-neglected to-do list that lives within Google Now. It’s not the same as Google Tasks, and it’s not the same as Google Keep. All three of these systems address essentially the same needs, and the fact that they’re splintered is maddening and confusing to users.
That being said, Reminders feels very naturally integrated into Inbox. Using the T shortcut summons a text area that allows you to quickly add a new Reminder.
These appear in your Inbox with the familiar finger icon, and Google will use its data magic to provide you with phone numbers, times, and other ancillary data if it thinks it’ll be useful.
It often is.
Snooze
In some cases, emails arrive that don’t immediately need your attention. Leaving them in the inbox obscures your more immediate email needs, so what’s an inbox zero adopter to do?
Snoozing emails was one of Mailbox’s most lauded features, and it continues to delight in Google Inbox.
Snooze removes an email from your inbox until you’re ready to deal with it. Emails can be snoozed to a different date/time, and even a different place, which means it’s easy to keep your inbox clean and still process emails that don’t require immediate action.
What I miss most from Mailbox is the ability to snooze to the desktop. This is a trick Mailbox can pull off because they have native apps on mobile as well as desktop, which Inbox does not (at least for now). It’s a feature I use a lot, so hopefully one day it finds its way to Inbox.
Things We’ve Lost
As with any paradigm shift, some things are lost in the transition from vanilla Gmail to Inbox. Some of these omissions may be temporary — this is a beta, after all — but some may turn out to be a deliberate. Two of the ones I noticed were the following:
- No more signatures
- No more starred emails
I’m not a fan of ostentatious email signatures, but a subtle one is nice to have, and when using Inbox, any signature must be added manually. There is no option to use them in Settings, and any signature that’s set for use in Gmail does not carry over.
The starred mail issue is more perplexing. In Inbox, Google introduces the concept of “Pinned” emails, which seem to address the same use case as starred emails did. Flipping the pin toggle to the right of the search bar switches you over to a view that shows only pinned emails.
This is confusing for several reasons.
For one thing, pinned emails already float to the top of Inbox, and since Inbox is built on the inbox zero philosophy, anything that’s in your inbox is an email that you still need to deal with. If email that’s pinned could also be marked as “done”, that would be understandable since you could use pins to designate important emails that you don’t need to see in your inbox.
But pinned emails exist only in the inbox; as soon as you mark them as done, they’re no longer pinned. So what are pins for, exactly?
My immediate assumption was that pins were a means to bring over starred emails for those used to Gmail’s priority system. This would have made some sense, but emails that are marked as starred in Gmail do not transfer over to Inbox in any way — they’re not migrated as pins, or even visible as a custom bundle. They’re just invisibly integrated into the rest of the stream.
The only real way for someone to migrate their starred emails over is to create a label for them in Gmail, then use that label view to pin the emails in Inbox. This is just plain silly.
Things We’ve Gained
If I’m sounding negative, then I should clarify that I actually like Inbox so far.
The workflow is a natural evolution of the inbox zero philosophy, but it’s also a very compelling way to switch to that philosophy, which is often the challenge.
Speeding up processing of common message types, extracting key details, integrating reminders, and encouraging acting on emails instead of just receiving them all seem like they should be obvious facets of a modern communication system.
Inbox feels futuristic but not alienating.
Unlike Wave, it feels like a product of its time that understands the pitfalls of its predecessors and builds upon them in challenging but exciting ways.
Building the Future of Email
Google has opened Inbox up as a beta to solicit critical feedback and help them improve the product. My intent is only to point out what I consider to be important flaws that compromise Inbox’ core purpose.
If Google intends to make this an email workflow for the masses, then they need to make sure that anyone can not only adopt it easily, but transition to it from their usual Gmail workflow.
Things like unmigrated stars, vanishing signatures, useless read states, and opaque distinctions between seemingly similar features are roadblocks that will seriously hinder a newcomer’s appreciation of how amazing Inbox can be.
I want to see Inbox transformed into the ideal email system, and I’m confident that Google is capable of accomplishing this.
Eight months after writing this (many of which were spent using Inbox), I revisited the topic on my blog to discuss what has changed, what hasn’t, and what it means.
Originally published at mariusmasalar.me on October 27, 2014.
Marius Masalar is a digital adventurer and game music composer. He’d love it if you said hi on Twitter.
