Well I remember really well the emails in MS-DOS.
white on black, and yes, at the time,
email invoked the sense of unprecedented connectedness,
that you couldn't feel lonely, in a way.
Ever, perhaps.
And you always, always felt excited to go and see
your inbox again because you did it
at very semi-regular intervals.
And over the next several years, that feeling all but vanished,
and email became the source of stress.
So I relate powerfully to your message.
Now, am I the target endiuser?
No. It's your wife.
I will be glad, that also you using it.
But it skews a little bit on women.
Even if of course, I would say 60% women, 40% men.
It's people who are not necessary super tech,
super techie, because that's an interesting distinction.
Everybody does email.
People are different in their behaviors.
And we're picking at the demographic which
is, they are less intensely working through emailing,
foldering, and creating filters and maybe working
in different projects, and they tend more to accumulate content
within their inbox.
They use the iPad, at home on the couch.
Sometimes they are women, maybe they are in their early 30s.
They might have kids, they browse,
and they shop online for their kids.
They find new things, maybe they look at recipes online.
And now that's really our persona.
It's Helen, which we have been building
this in the last six, eight, nine months.
Let's talk about the process of you arriving at your end-user
profile.
In the beginning, you start with the intention
of helping people fall in love with email again.
How did you go from that philosophical position
to an understanding of what the end-user profile is?
Well, the first step was understanding
where we wanted to get.
And the first wow moment was around the
You've Got Mail movie.
Because there, there was this sense of saying, oh,
that is it, that is the excitement of somebody opening
an inbox.
How can we get somebody excited right now?
And then that led us to focus even more on personal email,
because that's where there is this sense of enjoyment
for whatever is in there.
And that brought us also to the visuality,
to where you can interrupt with this frank kind of content.
That is something which is also very much in line
with how we feel about how we do email ourself.
My partner, first of all, who is really the product lead
this, and he has been starting doing this for 'himself made
women,' I would say.
His name is Jim, and so he would have done it
for someone looking like him, who likes online shopping
and so on-- which I do, too.
And then as demands advanced, we started to refine the concept.
At the time, we were doing something
which was much techier.
It was a plug-in for Gmail.
And then we realized that people do not install plug-ins.
They don't really know what they are.
But that allowed us to look a lot to play with the user
during that summer.
It was one year ago.
And then we were speaking with investors, or designers-- so
people into space-- and it was this understanding
that the user behavior we were looking at
was typical of what was really booming in iPad.
This was the moment that the couch shopping was booming,
and so they say, OK this is it.
That's what we have to do it, and that's
also the platform where we can really
innovate the most because this is a new platform,
and email has been brought here without really being a native,
as being a copy.
Already on the phone is not such a great media for email
the way it's done, because it looks like on the internet.
It's just reduced in size.
Now there are a few companies which
are taking a very interesting shot at it
for different demographics, I will say.
But emailing here, it's really nothing exciting.
So we say, OK, that's the place where we want to start from.