Early Thoughts on Badass Design
I’m on page 80 of 286 in Kathy Sierra’s book “BADASS: Making Users Awesome.” People I admire recommended this book, and after the first 20 pages or so I understood why. This article isn’t a book recommendation, or summary. It’s simply a connection that I made today because I’m 80 pages in.
My inbox is my master. I spend countless hours organizing it, and keeping it as close to zero as possible. But, no matter how hard I try to tame it; it overpowers me and I lose control. I blame myself for subscribing to newsletters, for not unsubscribing to them, and for the FOMO that makes me reach for the snooze feature instead of the delete option. Many times I even e-mail myself. Things looked bleak, but today I caught a glimpse of hope. Today Google Inbox taught me about reminders.
I was on the bus — looking at my iPhone — and reading about a prototyping tool called FramerJS. Someone on the FramerJS Facebook Group shared an interesting link, and I quickly launched Inbox to e-mail myself the link (I don’t read my saved links on Facebook; I have no excuse). I was ready to contribute to my e-mail problem, but Google Inbox stepped in and saved me — like so:
Yes, Google — I am e-mailing myself. You’re right, I think a reminder is a better way to do this.
Thanks Google, no more self-directed e-mails for me. Now, I’m one step closer to kicking e-mail’s ass.
The point is that through no effort on my part, this product made me a better e-mail user. I’m so pleased with this small increment in skill that I wrote an article on about it. I’m inspired to do the same for my users, and I hope you are too. If you have any examples of products or services that empower their users in a compelling context please share them in a response below, or with me on twitter.
