Google had a chance to fix our email experience for the better but they
ultimately failed. As we explore some of the new ways companies are trying to
improve the email experience in our series on the future of email, I think
it's important to take a look back at some of the decisions companies made
that led to where email is today and what that means for email going forward,
and I can't think of a better example of this than the Google product Inbox by
Gmail. Google is one of the most popular players in email today, they
revolutionized email back with the debut of Gmail on April 1st 2004. Gmail had
some industry-leading features at the time like one gig of cloud storage it
could search for keywords in all of your emails and it's advanced JavaScript code
allowed the interface to be much smoother than the competition when it
launched. It made email modern for that era but since then I'd argue that email
has just not changed a whole lot and overall I think email at least in my
opinion can be stressful and just downright no fun to use a lot of the
time and this applies to lots of different email services out there and
clients including Gmail today now part of this is due to the culture that has
developed around email and then part of it is due to the technology itself the
user interface of a lot of email clients consists of a cluttered mess everything
just stacks everything on top of itself it's just kind of a nightmare and Gmail
is no exception when you look at the modern Gmail design there is just a lot
to look at and not in a good way it's cluttered now sure there are ways to
hide certain things go to a tab view but you still have that long sidebar the
font size by default is small and the way the emails are stacked it's like
reading rows of an Excel spreadsheet this brings us to inbox by Gmail now
don't get too excited because Google killed this service off last year in
2019 now there are a couple of hacks you can use to get your current Gmail to
look like inbox by Gmail and behave in similar ways and we'll get to those at
the end of the video inbox by Gmail was more of a
revolution than a mere iteration on the original Gmail concept gone was having
to worry about archiving messages remarking things as unread sorting
emails into folders inbox was truly different and it introduced some ideas
that are now present in new email products like hey that will dive into a
little later on in our series exploring the future of email one of the biggest
changes inbox made was introducing the idea that email should be sorted broadly
into three areas inbox snooze and done done is basically archiving in Gmail
today however the name change is more important than you may think
it forced users to think of their inbox like a task list when you were done with
an email you just click done and it goes into the done section if you don't have
time to read an email or respond to it just snooze it and it'll come back into
the inbox at the time you set you could also get to snoozed emails from the
sidebar as well if you want to pin an email to the top of your inbox you could
do that and this is also where reminders that you created would be stored as well
another major change in box made to Gmail was with the UI it gave elements
more breathing room more whitespace between text the blue color in my
opinion was easier on the eyes and brings more a sense of calm to the UI
versus the more alarming read that Gmail used at the time emails were laid out
chronologically however they were grouped together emails from today this
week this month and then other months it made it very easy to scroll through also
it pulled certain links out of emails like links to Google Docs or calendar
events in big preview windows within each email card which I still prefer -
the way Gmail does it today now if you were a fan of inbox you've noticed that
I haven't mentioned the feature that probably was the best part of the entire
experience and that was bundles Google would automatically bundle together
emails into specific categories travel promotions social finance and purchases
it was a lifesaver when you try to get all of your trip emails together like
your flight tickets car reservations and hotel accommodations inbox would also
automatically group all of these emails together into a specific trip you can
also teach inbox to put certain emails into these bundles as well later on in
inboxes life Google added a nifty undo send feature that would give users 10
seconds to undo sending a message they also added smart replies which are
auto-generated short replies that you can quickly use to respond to an email
in one tap now if you're thinking that some of these features sound eerily
similar to the features on Gmail today you are right a lot of the features from
Gmail today were actually imported from inbox by Gmail like snoozing emails well
it's great the Gmail did move some of the features from inbox by Gmail over to
Gmail where Google failed here is they did not bring over bundles and they did
not bring over inboxes UI and fix Gmail's UI inboxes UI was more simple to
me it was easier to get things done with inboxes three categories and with
bundles inbox was actually trying to declutter the inbox experience by
bundling up all the emails that you just don't care about so they don't take up
as much space in the UI Gmail just doesn't really do that this is a key
element that other services like hey have adopted hey even renamed the inbox
to inbox to emphasize only important stuff should go here but oddly Gmail
didn't adopt this concept Gmail did add a tab view that is similar to bundles
but it's just not at the same time it doesn't for example collapse all of your
promotional emails in the inbox into one line allowing you to mark all of them
has done in case you don't have time to go through and read them so why didn't
Google adopt inboxes UI for Gmail and is there a way currently today to get Gmail
to look like what inbox by Gmail did well to answer the first question my
guess here is a lot of people rely on Gmail and when I say a lot of people I
mean like millions of people so it may just have been that doing that
substantial of a UI change for that large of user base was just not
something that Google wanted to do Gmail is super powerful and allows you to work
through your email in several different ways so
Google likely needs to continue to support different ways its millions of
users use email which doesn't afford it as much wiggle room to be much more
opinionated about how email should work as newer players are like spark mail and
hey but that doesn't explain why Google just didn't bring over the inbox look as
an option to Gmail and also bring over bundles that way if it was optional you
wouldn't be forcing this change on all of your users but you would have given
users the choice to enable it if they wanted to that to me seems like the best
option for this and I just still don't know why Google didn't do it now if you
want your current Gmail today to look like inbox by Gmail of yesterday there
is a way to do that you can do that through Chrome browser extensions I use
both inbox theme for Gmail and inbox in Gmail as my extensions to get me that
classic inbox look and overall it works quite well now if you're interested in
trying something completely different from Gmail that does build off the
foundations of inbox by Gmail you should definitely check out our next episode in
our series exploring the future of email it's going to be about hey bye Basecamp
the now-famous service that went up against Apple and their App Store
Policies so make sure you're subscribed to our
channel so you don't miss out on that next episode now if you liked this video
and found it helpful make sure you hit that thumbs up button below and let me
know in the comments if you miss inbox by Gmail as much as I do well that'll do
it for me I'm Josh Tedder for six months later
thanks for watching