DANIEL SIEBERG: Hi there.
I'm Daniel Sieberg with Google Developers
Live here at I/O 2013.
And I'm joined right now by Shalini Agarwal, who is a
product manager with Gmail.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yep.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Gmail, which obviously for a lot of folks
has become indispensable on the consumer side.
But what we're going to talk about is not just the changes
people are going to see in their inbox, but how the team
has thought what can other companies do to really make it
more manageable and easier for people to get through all of
that information that they get every day.
So tell me about some of the announcements that were made
here first of all at I/O.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
Great.
So yesterday we announced that we were launching four
different types of actions in the inbox.
And really, the motivation behind it was that users have
a lot of email to process.
And each email takes a lot of steps, a lot of
time to really manage.
So anything you want to do involves a lot of steps.
We really wanted to bring those steps and those actions
directly to the top level of the inbox, so users can manage
their iterations with their services much more quickly,
much more easily, and get through the things that they
need to do.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So the idea of these Quick Action Buttons or
however we want to describe them, you don't
have to open the email.
They're right there.
We've had the chance to test it internally.
And I feel like I've only scratched the surface with
what you can do with them.
But it's right there as a button within the [INAUDIBLE].
SHALINI AGARWAL: It's right there.
The button is right there at the top of the inbox.
For certain cases when you need more information, you can
click on it and it opens up a nice overlay with the key
information that you need and the key actions.
And that's it.
It's really quite simple and quite fast for users.
DANIEL SIEBERG: All right.
Well, let's see it in action.
SHALINI AGARWAL: All right.
DANIEL SIEBERG: You've got a demo here for us.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: You're going to go into your virtual inbox,
we should say.
This is kind of your email.
SHALINI AGARWAL: It is.
The first action that we'll take a look at is RSVPing.
So when your friends invite you to events, or birthday
parties, or whatnot, you usually get an email telling
you about the invitation.
And now with the action in the inbox, you get a button on the
right-hand side, this RSVP button right here.
And when you click on it, you get the key information.
Here I can find out that OK, it's a Taco Night.
The event was hosted by Google Calendar.
And it's on Sunday at 7:00 PM.
And there's one other person going.
If Clarence had entered a location, that would
also show up here.
So with one click, I open this overlay.
And another click, I hit yes.
Now he knows I'm going.
So that's it.
Gmail on the backend has sent information to Calendar.
So if you want, we can take a quick look
over at Google Calendar.
And here it is--
Taco Night.
And there it is.
Yes, I'm going.
This is Google Calendar, but this could work
for any event service.
For example, Paperless Post is one of our launch partners.
So when we launch this feature, we'll be
launching it with them.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And so they would choose to have this
added to their email campaign, or whatever--
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: --they were going to do with it.
It's something they build into the email itself when they
send it out, essentially?
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
So it's actually very simple.
Our goal was to make it extremely easy for developers
to do this.
So all they have to do is add markup to their emails.
We've been working with schema.org to try and get this
markup standardized and reviewed by other parties out
there, other email clients.
And it's that simple.
They add some schema, that word "markup," tell us about
the event, tell us about the action, tell us where to send
the response once the user takes it, and that's it.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And I hope too obviously is that there would
be increased engagement with people because it's so
convenient for them to actually--
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
DANIEL SIEBERG: --just one click and they're in.
Great.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
When you host a party, you want to know
if people are coming.
You want people to quickly figure out if they can come
and respond.
And not just that, when I get invitations to parties, I
first want to see the information about the party.
Then later on, I might decide if I'm going or not.
And then on the day of the party, I'll go back and find
the email to get the key details of like what time is,
where it is.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right.
SHALINI AGARWAL: So we wanted to make all of those steps
really, really easy.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
Now you've got a few more things you can
show us here, right?
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
So the second type of action is what we call
the One-Click Action.
And really, it's just one button to
take a specific action.
So in this case, Google Offers has already started marking up
their emails with this schema.
So when I get the daily email from them--
today's happens to be from Michael's Stores,
which I shop at a lot.
I get picture frames done there.
So with one click, I can say, get offer.
And, looks like it didn't work.
But normally what would happen is when I click a button, I
would go over to Google offers, and it would show up
right there.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: But clearly, we had a little
demo breakdown here.
DANIEL SIEBERG: It could easily be a connectivity
issue, which I think it is.
I see down on the right there--
SHALINI AGARWAL: There it is.
Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: --that we've lost the Wi-Fi, so.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Let's try it one more time.
Reload here.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Here we go.
Here we go.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Now, let's try again.
I click the button.
There it is.
DANIEL SIEBERG: This looks promising.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Gmail.
DANIEL SIEBERG: There you go.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Sent the message to Google
Offers, so I go here.
I reload this tab also.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And--
DANIEL SIEBERG: There it is.
SHALINI AGARWAL: There it is.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Very nice.
SHALINI AGARWAL: One click.
Didn't have to open email.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Didn't have to leave the inbox.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And I can keep going
on to the next item.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's fantastic.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And then, the next one, now these-- so tell
me again, which ones were announced here and which ones
are coming soon?
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
So we announced four.
We announced the RSVP that we saw, the One-Click button--
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Rate and Review, and a Go To action,
which is really for complex actions that can't be achieved
from the inbox.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: So for those, you actually need to go off to
a site, a deep link, and complete your actions.
Those were the four that were announced.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
And is the next one one of the Rate and and Review ones you
can show us?
SHALINI AGARWAL: The next one is the Rate and Review.
Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: So again, we're working with Seamless as
one of our life partners.
And so when you order through them, you order food from a
restaurant, they can send you an email that asks you to rate
your experience.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And that's important,
because you want to tell.
When you rate your experiences, you get better
suggestions.
So your experience about the service is
better down the road.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
SHALINI AGARWAL: So with the Review option, similar to
RSVP, you get the key information you need--
the name of the restaurant, whoever you ordered through, a
picture of whether it's a product.
Here it's food.
It could be a product, a movie, anything.
And you can quickly rate and review, right
in this little box.
So you say hey, solid meal.
Will order again.
And that's it.
You can see that Gmail is sending the rating to
Seamless, and that's it.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Does it get posted anywhere, or shared
anywhere else?
SHALINI AGARWAL: At seamless.com.
DANIEL SIEBERG: It goes to seamless.com.
OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
That's great.
SHALINI AGARWAL: It goes to seamless.com.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I think from a convenience
standpoint, that's awesome.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Sometimes you just are a little reluctant to
go into your email and then go to the site, and
so on, and so on.
For Seamless or any other company, this is obviously
going to be a big win because--
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: --now they're really going to get that kind
of people actually responding to these things rather than
just deciding not to.
SHALINI AGARWAL: It's kind of amazing.
I counted the number of steps it takes to actually do this
without the button.
And it takes six steps.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I believe you.
I am not surprised.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And that's if you remember your login
information and all that stuff.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
Yep.
It's a deterrent for some people.
It just is.
OK.
Now the next one, can we talk about the dial feature here?
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
This is another--
it's the same thing as the One Click Action that we saw from
Google Offers.
But the really cool thing, I got to say that the One-Click
action is my favorite, because you can do so many different
kinds of things with it.
Any type of use case that is just a one click
action can be done.
So in this case, it's an email that's actually from
[? Esna, ?]
which is a communication service that's letting me know
that I missed a call from Claudio.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And so they've enabled this One-Click
Button, so when I dial it, so when I click the button, Gmail
tells us now, OK, the user clicked the
button that you added.
And what they do on the backend is dial, is connect
the call between me and Claudio.
So the moment I click it, both our phones start ringing.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Got you.
OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: I could click it now, but then Claudio's
phone might be ringing, and I don't know where he is.
He might be in a session somewhere.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And then the next one after that, this is
not available just yet, the next.
SHALINI AGARWAL: The two that are available as
of today are the--
or actually, sorry, as of yesterday-- are this Go To
Action, which is the sort of the short cut to a deep link
on another site, and the Button Action, which is what
you see here with Dial and Get Offer.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yep.
OK.
SHALINI AGARWAL: The ones that are coming soon are RSVP and
Rate and Review.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK.
So the Check In one for flight, that's actually
available today.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah, it's available today.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
That's great.
So show me what will be involved here.
SHALINI AGARWAL: All I would do, so this button is actually
not going to work.
But all would do is I click--
when you receive this email, what do you want to do?
You want to check in for your flight.
It's not that you need to necessarily open the email.
It's not that you need to, but if you do decide you want to
open the email, what we will have is a beautiful flight
card at the very top, similar to the cards you see in Google
Search and Google Now, at the top of the email.
And it will give you the key information--
your connection times, your flight details, the airport
information, and also if the flight's on time or not.
I can't tell you how many times I've gone to the airport
to find out that my flight was delayed.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Delayed or cancelled all together.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
So here, when you get the Check In email, you'll also
get this beautiful card.
It's not launched yet, but it'll be launched soon.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So there is a tie-in then with
Now and with Search.
I mean, we should point out that this is all part of what
we're talking about, right?
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
Yeah.
It definitely is.
For example, if here we have a oceanic airlines.
But if any airline were to mark-up their emails, their
confirmation emails, or check-in emails, with schema.
That same information will feed many
products, if you will.
So today, it'll enable experiences in Gmail, and into
Google Now, and Google Search, and potentially other
experiences across the way.
So that users can get the information that they need,
that they are getting from via email, at the
best time and place.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right.
This all seems to be tied into the theme of getting the
information you need quickly, sort of at a glance, and then
moving on to whatever else you need to be doing.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
Exactly.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Now tell me, it feels like there's so much
potential for this.
Can you tell us what's on the horizon here, where you see
this going?
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
I mean this is--
we're really excited about this.
And it's really just the beginning.
Over time, we'll be adding more types of actions.
Over time, we'll be adding more types of social data.
So I talked about the Flight Card, but also we'll have
things for events and hotels.
And we'll be expanding those experiences across Google.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
What's the response been from the merchants and the
companies that you've talked to?
And maybe you can, I know you mentioned a few of the
partners like Seamless, but if you wanted to run down maybe a
few that have been really actively involved in this.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah, definitely.
So we've gotten a lot of response.
Because at the end of the day, companies and services care
about user engagement.
And so they're sending their users emails because they want
to tell them something or do something.
And so it's been pretty exciting as we demo these
types of features for partners, and the different
kinds of use cases they come up with.
So every partner we have, we start the conversation by
saying, tell us about the things that you do with your
users and what communications you have with them over email.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right
SHALINI AGARWAL: Because the types of things, it can be
anything from, for example, Spotify.
When you subscribe, so I use Spotify and I listen to my
brother's playlist.
I subscribe to them.
So every time he adds music, which is actually pretty often
which is fun, they send me an email.
DANIEL SIEBERG: You get a notification-- an email.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
And so now, I can, now those emails have a button on the
right-hand side that say, listen to the song.
And when I click that button, it opens a tab.
And if my player's installed, it just starts playing.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's very clever.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
And some, I can see some of these businesses would
actually want to do multiple versions of it.
I mean--
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: You could get one like an airline might want
a review, as well as to remind you of your flight.
SHALINI AGARWAL: How was your flight?
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yeah.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Exactly, because I get
those emails too.
So it's a bit of both.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: You talked a bit about the motivation
behind all of this, but maybe you can kind of expand on that
a little bit, just in terms of what people have to deal with
in their inbox.
I mean, we're all coping with
information overload sometimes.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I imagine the team really thought hard.
In some ways, this feels really intuitive to me.
It almost feels like this hasn't been there before?
Like it feels like something that just makes sense.
Can you reveal a little bit of the thinking in all of this?
I think it's really neat.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah, so it basically boils down to each
email today looks the same, but really it contains all
sorts of different types of information.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And so, it should be more tailored.
It should be easier to figure out what is it you want.
It should be more structured.
Email is extremely unstructured today.
So everything you do, you have to figure out.
The user has to do the work, to figure out what it is that
they're being asked to do, what information is in there,
and dig for it, and open different tabs, and it's like
a funnel type of process.
DANIEL SIEBERG: [INAUDIBLE].
Right.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And it's frustrating.
And so often times, you probably know this as a user.
I feel it.
We see it.
A lot of emails go unanswered or unopened.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yeah.
SHALINI AGARWAL: But that doesn't mean the user doesn't
want to do those things.
It's just too painful.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I think that's an excellent point, because I
think there's best intentions perhaps on both sides--
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
DANIEL SIEBERG: --but not enough of a sort of an easy
bridge between the requests and the action
to actually do it.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And now, if you're just asking somebody to
click one button, it doesn't get much
simpler than doing that.
SHALINI AGARWAL: No.
No.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Anything else you want to mention in terms
of what's coming?
SHALINI AGARWAL: So I would just say that we definitely
want to add more actions.
We're really excited about this
concept of In Place Actions.
So we are going to work closely with our existing
partners and we want to hear from developers.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I was going to say, I imagine you're going to
discover a lot of ways that it can be used that--
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
DANIEL SIEBERG: --hadn't been thought of before.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Exactly.
And we already did, you know, through the process, we've
already come up with a few actions and we want to add
over the coming months, because they will be good
platforms for lots of different cases.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right.
SHALINI AGARWAL: And help users
connect with their services.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And this is all measurable, I
mean, by the companies.
They could really see the kind of engagement attraction that
they're getting from people looking at this.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Yeah, I mean, they can track their links.
They can track when you just click on links.
They can track when the servlets on a backend are hit.
So when we send them a response, they know.
And so they can easily track that.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
All right.
Well, Shalini, thank you so much.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Thank you, Daniel.
DANIEL SIEBERG: This has been a great--
I've learned a lot.
I mean I use Gmail all the time, but I think this is
going to be a fantastic addition to it.
SHALINI AGARWAL: We hope so.
We're pretty excited.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
Thank you so much.
SHALINI AGARWAL: Thanks.
DANIEL SIEBERG: All right.
That's going to do it for now here on
Google Developers Live.
Stay tuned for lots more content, right here.