This is what Gmail could have become. And why it didn’t.
In this opinion piece, I go back in time to understand the uprise of Gmail, the birth and death of Google Inbox, and present an Inbox-like Gmail concept, explaining why something like it will probably never come to life.
Since “Internet” started being a common word among workplaces and homes worldwide, reading and sending e-mails have always been some of the most common things users do while online.
Gmail, Google’s take on e-mail, launched publicly on May 1st, 2004. By the time, it was revolutionary. I still remember to this day, despite being a teenager, cheering when I got a Gmail invitation (yes — it spent a couple years an invitation-based system before the wide rollout).
Alongside Gmail, Google was launching all sorts of products during the ’00 decade. In fact, Google launched so many of them there’s a dedicated open-source repository to honor all “Killed by Google” products.
But the ’00s were another time for the internet — very different from 2019 standards. Browsers didn’t support a lot of interface tricks we can have today. There was a lot of hacking dedicated to making websites compatible, still — ugh.
Let’s take a look back at what Gmail specifically was — and what it became.
Google hadn’t stated adopting a modern interface focused approach to its products up until 2014, when it introduced the first iteration of Material Design to the world (in 2018, Google updated the specification to “Material Design 2”).
Material Design came as a huge blowing force to standardize and create components for scaling up design systems. Its influence, alongside the birth of modern design software like Sketch, a few years lated, really helped crave the concept of “Design System”, so prevalent in businesses all over the world.
But let’s remember history: not longer than 5 years ago, Gmail, its second-most used product (just behind Search itself), looked like this. Despite the announcement of Material Design.
And it kept on looking like that in 2015. And 2016. And 2017. Until 2019, actually. Why?
Because it worked — and still works. For most people.
Being the second-most used application in the world is not your everyday application, where changes (in UI, UX, front-end or back-end) are simple decisions. Outages, failures, complaints come in the form of potential billions in losses.
So why change?
There’s a everlasting clash between business decisions and design (or technology, for that matter) decisions. While tech and design advances, business metrics tell, most of the time, not to mess with something that’s working. And in a Gmail-scenario scale, that’s exactly the case.
“But it’s ugly! An eyesore!”, you may say.
For us, designers, yes. It definetely is. But there’s something frequently forgotten to be told and taught to designers: what is it that defines “good design”.
From a business perspective (not a design one), good design is one that delivers on desired metrics — when talking about a product like Gmail, it’s usually engagement and time spent to complete commonly executed tasks.
E-Mail is something that’s part of most people’s workflows in some manner. Across all industries. Across all education levels. It permeates scenarios unimaginable for the average designer.
Understanding all of these scenarios and forecasting the behavior of key metrics for a major design overhaul to work is something, if everything, risky. No focus group, user testing or any validation techniques allow a company to mitigate the risk of changing drastically an interface of a product like Gmail.
Designers from all over the world have tried (and will always keep trying) to suggest new takes on Gmail (and mail in general). Just search Dribbble, for instance.
What was Google’s Inbox, then? (Rest in Peace, best e-mail tool I’ve ever used!)
An experiment around e-mail. For a subset of people, an almost perfect one. I’m included in that pack.
Google’s Inbox launched in 2014, bringing not only the Material Design 1 UI standards, but a Getting Things Done approach to e-mail, bundled with, for me, the best AI around mail ever seen.
Inbox made me want use e-mail more. And a lot of people around the world, too. Its death made me hate e-mail again. But why is it the case, and if Inbox had this effect on so many people, why did it die?
First of all, it looked much cleaner than Gmail’s convoluted mess. And that is the case because of the adoption of some of modern design’s principles (summarized and put to practice by the Material Design guidelines):
- Breathing space for information via great usage of whitespace;
- Hierarchy made clear through shadows and color contrast;
- Information grouping for easier eye-scanning;
- Date separation for e-mails;
These interface elements were accompained by great concepts (and their implementation through stellar AI, who always seemed to get it right what was really “important” for me — something the current Gmail is terrible at):
- Bundling: Automatically grouping airline tickets with hotel and car reservations under “Trips” was fenomenal; Unifying bills and purchases was also such a time saver.
- “Done” instead of “read”: A courtesy of the GTD methodology, the concept of treating e-mails like tasks and marking them as “done” made my brain feel so much more productive than the “read” approach. This is psychology at its finest — and for those interested, a great designer should understand human behavior and psychology by its heart. If you haven’t yet, read these two books right now: 1 and 2.
- Reminders: Another GTD cue. If you treat emails like tasks, you might as well blend custom tasks into your worflow. This was awesome.
- Snoozing: Something that’s been implemented to Gmail since the death of inbox, at last — being able to reschedule the time you’re going to tackle a task is something very welcoming.
The three first items on the above list are still missing from Gmail. Bundling is set to arrival on Gmail (despite no time frame was given by Google), but I’m afraid we might not get exactly what we had with Inbox. That’s just a hunch, but the constraints applied to 2019’s iteration of Gmail may cripple the Web experience of bundling very hard.
We may have better luck on Android and iOS, but if the design team can’t make a good enough experience on web, Bundles may be sacrificed to a more conservative approach, which would be a shameful example of how the current state of Gmail cripples the enhancement of mail standards.
The concept of marking emails as “Done”, though, seems really dead within the Google ecossystem. For a mass-focused product such as Gmail, the GTD methodology for e-mail is unlikely to return, and marking things as done is its main characteristic (it’s named Getting Things Done, at last).
The “reminders” concept has been kind of implemented to Gmail in the forms of the “Tasks” sidebar, accompanying Calendar and Keep. The real mixing with regular e-mails was the charm for me, though. This is just not the same thing.
But what if Google could retain Inbox’s soul and make a new version of Gmail which stood by its principles? How should that look like?
I took the liberty to design two slightly different versions of an Inbox-like Gmail. The first one brings an almost Inbox-like aura, sporting some UI guidelines now deprecated in Google’s Material Theme, like the gray background with e-mails appearing in floating cards.
The second one is more reminiscent of Google’s current Material Theme, lacking the contrast seen in the previous iteration.
As a designer, it’s fairly easy to recreate and envision what Gmail could’ve become on paper — it’s just a design, a piece of imagery.
Sadly, as an entrepreneur and looking at the big picture around e-mail and Google, I can’t see Gmail becoming what Inbox once was: a place that made me like e-mailing. Those brief 4 years in time show that some problems in tech may not ever be disrupted, if the incumbents have no real world incentive to disrupt them and startups may not have the leverage to take that problem away from the incumbents’ hands.
At least, one can dream.
