Deleting mails | a Gmail case study
Analyzing ways to improve the Gmail delete function
Introduction
Gmail is the most common choice to send and receive mails for millions of people. It’s flexibility across platforms and accessibility makes it convenient for most of it’s users.
However, one of the most common problems of this application is the process of deleting mails.
Everyone who use Gmail has gone through the pain of less storage due to spam emails, and mails from newsletters and other random publications they might have subscribed unknowingly. All these pile up the inbox in no time, making storage a problem.
Apparently, there are third-party apps to unsubscribe from newsletters and clear storage, but that is another task by itself. Having a native solution is key to achieve good user experience.
In the website version, there is indeed an option to select and delete all the mails in your inbox, and also filters to either select all, none, read, unread, starred and unstarred mails. But interestingly, there is no such option for the mobile platform, which makes it a hassle to delete mails on the mobile app. The only way to delete mails on the mobile application is to manually select every mail one-by-one, which is definitely time consuming and irritating.
The following data was collected by a survey which asked 30 people, which platform they prefer? website or the mobile application? All the participants were office workers and businessmen, who use Gmail on a daily, for work-related mails.
Most of the users prefer the mobile application as accessibility is easier. This makes it important to maintain a similar user experience for the mobile platform too, to make the users’ life easier.
Aim
The aim of this project/case study is to design a solution to make the process of deleting mails on the mobile application easier.
The problem: The inbox is usually filled with unwanted mails most of the time.
During my user interviews, I found out that users generally have only 30–35% of mails that are actually legit and useful to them. Rest of it are all spam and useless ones which eat up their storage.
The solution: Mass Delete — an efficient way to clear junk mails in a quicker and easier way.
By designing a way to sort out each sender’s mails independently, and deleting them all at once, we give the users more control over their deleting process, while also saving their time and leaving some much needed room in their inbox.
The process
I started off to explore the problems faced by real life Gmail users. I framed certain contextual based questions to extract pain points and come up with solutions.
Here are some of the questions:
- What’s their general experience of deleting mails in Gmail?
- How is it different from the web in the mobile platform?
- How much does an efficient mail deleting process matter to them?
- Will fixing this issue improve their user experience by any chance? If so, then how?
Through my interviews, I collected insights about common user problems, which helps in ideating solutions.
User Pain points
pain point #1
Selecting mails one-by-one: Users are frustrated as there is no feature to either filter or select all mails at once, which makes the process time-consuming.
pain point #2
Leaving mails undeleted: All the users understand clearing their inbox once in a while is good practice. But as the mobile app provides no easy way to do this, they usually leave this unattended, leading their inboxes to run out of space in no time.
User Insights
Users want an easy way to clear their inbox through their mobile application, as almost every user carries their phones most of the time, and they feel it is easy to access. Making this improvement would enhance their experience and also save a lot of their time.
Ideation
After gathering insights from the interviews, I started ideating different solutions accurate to the users’ needs to successfully solve the problem.
Chosen idea: Mass Delete.
This is a feature which is native to Gmail’s mobile application which lets users to delete mails in one-go, while also giving them control over the whole deleting process.
How it works
This feature provides a “heads-up” to users when they select more than 5 mails from the same sender.
The system guesses whether the user would want to Mass Delete mails from that particular sender and sends a pop-up notification on the user’s screen. The user can select YES to continue or NO, if they don’t want to delete all mails, giving them more control.
If the user decides to Mass delete mails from the sender, the Mass Delete screen shows up. Here, the screen shows who is the sender and how many total mails from that sender are present in the inbox.
The user can either choose to delete all mails from that sender or specifically choose the time duration of mails (for example, he can choose to delete mails which are only 2 months old from that sender). The system provides a feedback screen after the action is completed, as confirmation.
The deleted mails can be retrieved, if ever needed by the users. The deleted mails stay in the bin up to 2 months until they are deleted permanently.
Mass Delete can also be accessed from the Hamburger menu, where the user will be navigated to a slightly different screen than earlier, where the user can search a certain sender’s address and proceed with deleting those mails.
User flow task analysis
The user flow task analysis gives a clear idea of how the new user will navigate through the newly added feature. It explores all the possible tasks the user will complete while using the feature. Doing this is important as this method provides a blueprint of the user’s footsteps while using the feature.
Wireframes
Final design
This was an effort to make a reliable tool like Gmail more efficient to users who use it on a daily. Introducing this feature into the application improves management of mails and makes it a better application to use overall.
These are some resources I used to complete this article:
- Mobbin for screen references of the Gmail application.
- Material Design to refer google guidelines for the design.
- Design at Meta for the device mockups.
Thanks for your time!
