Email Reinventing Quest. Episode 1: People Talk

Hello, I’m Anna, product manager at Mailburn. Today I want to share with you how we prototyped our conversations view. Most companies don’t share their internal processes but we think it’s kind of cool :).

What emails are the most important in your inbox? There is no doubt that emails from clients, colleagues and partners are. They have top priority in contrast with other emails (like newsletters or service notifications). We call them Conversations, and so, reinventing them became our main focus in Mailburn.

Email threads are hopelessly outdated

How email dialogues look today? Emails are grouped into threads (we secretly dislike those who prefer flat email list against threaded view), every next email contains all previous messages in form of quotes. Moreover, every email has a signature again and again. This structure was invented decades ago and almost unchanged survived to the present day.

Ok, let’s disregard our habits for a moment and take a look at conversations with fresh eyes. They look kind of ugly, don’t you think? You see the same information, even when it’s redundant. Conversation body looks illogical with all the unnecessary margins and confusing layout. Visual garbage is so abundant is it almost impossible to skim such conversation, and everybody knows that we skim texts. And we haven’t even touched cases when there are multiple people send you emails with attachments and inline quote their replies.

It’s no wonder business communications broke into messengers domain — the territory of simple chatting. Messengers are more personal and they have better user experience than emails clients. It is much easier to browse history and write fast replies in chat interface. Remember that we are talking about mobile email here.

First step — turn email into chat

Without hesitation we turned mobile emailing into familiar messenger. We hid all signatures and quotes. The message body itself was packed in a bubble. After a while, we began to receive feedback from users:

“Chat view is not suitable for business emails!”
“Huge messages are uncomfortable to read in such bubbles”.

We started to notice other flaws too. For example, avatars are too far from names. Аnd look how much of valuable space is not used at all (indicated with orange color).

Here, I have to admit that we were so inspired by the idea that we didn’t think enough about the layout. We missed the best form. After a while we decided it was time to stop and rethink our approach taking into account user feedback.

Next step — realize that email is not chat

You know, when you’re starting a startup you need to be able to respond quickly and modify your product on the fly.

1. To hell with bubbles! The form should not overwhelm the content. Our goal is to make the text easier to read.
2. Contact information is unnecessary and will be available further on tap.
3. Avatar and name now live together, cheers!
4. Add date and new message dividers. This removes small visual elements and adds visual markers for faster skimming.
5. Pay more attention to attachments. They now have a preview and are easy to tap. Keep color coding based on file extension.

Finally, get the most from text input

I want to mention how we adopted iMessage input field for email. The field itself is pretty narrow, it is limited to 7 lines of text which is roughly 15 words. This doesn’t work fine for long messages, and most emails are. Scrolling inside such small input can drive one mad.

What did we do to squeeze the maximum possible space for text?

1. Move Attach icon to the top bar
2. Detach Send button so it hovers above input
3. Get rid of the extra frame. Nobody needs it anyway :)
4. Allow input field to grow vertically as far as the screen allows. Now it can hold up to 15 lines which is can be as much as 40 words.

What’s next?

I want to note that the work doesn’t stop here. We still have a lot of cool ideas about how to simplify the work with heavy inboxes. For example, introduce search within the thread, show enriched contact information in a separate view or finally fix this awful forward layout.

By the way, we just released our latest version, it is very cool and you have to try it. Here is the download link for you.

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See you in the next episode!