Gmail’s new Inbox: A user review
When Gmail came out in 2004, I was a fanatic. I scoured the internet with my sister looking for invites. It was orders of magnitude better than Hotmail — I couldn’t imagine a world before it.
Today I felt the same excitement as I got an invite to Inbox, Gmail’s new email interface, from my one of old-coworkers, a Gmail engineer. I was lucky to get an insight into the long term Gmail vision while I worked there, and it is awesome to see some of these coming to life today.
As all the tech press right now seems to regurgitated blogposts from writers who didn’t try it yet, I thought I’d write a first-time user review of Inbox.
Unboxing Inbox
My first experience with Inbox was downloading the app on Android, and I have to be honest I was a bit underwhelmed. It felt similar to the existing Gmail app (which is awesome). My Gmail Android app already batched up emails into the smart filter categories so it felt pretty similar.
Then I watched the video — ooo it’s available on desktop! I immediately went to inbox.google.com on my computer. This is what I was hoping for! The new Inbox was gorgeous. Everything felt cleaner and with more room to move. I felt noticeably less stressed as I got used to using it pretty quickly — checking off emails I didn’t need to do anything with felt natural and pinning something gave me comfort that things I needed would stick around. I realized what “sweep” meant and swept away tons of promotions, updates, and newsletters. It was a great feeling. I snoozed a bunch of emails (loved this).
Most useful features:
Snooze — This feature let you snooze an email for later in the day, tomorrow, 1 week or a specified date. I love the idea and it helped me move more quickly through my inbox. I’d reply, and then snooze. I felt like I selected one week the most often which made me dread that day next week a bit, but we’ll see what happens. When I selected Someday, it disappeared and now only shows up in Snooze. Will it ever appear again? I’m not sure.
Bundle & Sweep — The bundled promos, updates buckets are nice in regular Gmail, but the one click “Sweep” to archive on Inbox is awesome. It made it so quick to clean up my Inbox. Being a full time student I do have a lot of misclassified mail from mailing lists and students that get put in odd buckets, but I still didn’t mind.
Delightful Surprises
+Mention to add contacts to email: I went to add in a couple people an email, at the top of email writing “+Justin” and an autocomplete box popped up with all my contacts named Justin and when I clicked on it, Inbox had added him into the To: field. It’s still a little more cumbersome than before to just add people to the To: field or remove someone, but this feature is so wonderful I don’t care.
Shortcut for most frequently emailed: As I clicked the big red plus to write an email, I saw the smiling face of my sister and a few others who are my most frequently emailed contacts as shortcuts. Cool!
Photo & Doc previews inline: Scrolling through my Inbox was so fast. I slowed down when I spotted the attachment and photo previews in the line of an email. Maybe I’ll pin one with some happy photos so every day I open my Inbox it’s a good thought.
Bundling Labels: I saw I could bundle some labels which was cool. Why not all of them I thought? Maybe some don’t have enough email to make it useful. I decided to bundle my “Note to self” label which is emails I send myself — usually attachments.
Room for improvement
New messages: Later in the day when I went back to check Inbox, I was confused. My unread messages were all mixed up in my Inbox with snoozed ones. It kind of made sense since I needed to process them all, but it was hard to make that mental switch. I was worried I was missing some unread mail, and it just looked weird to me. Maybe marking snoozed messages unread again and moving up bundles with unread messages would help.
Reply/Forward: After I had sorted most of my mail, and I went to reply to an email. How could I do it? I hovered around looking for a little reply arrow, I clicked the 3 dots, nothing. Then I saw it at the bottom of the email, whew! It was confusing though to figure out how to forward and email, and definitely more steps than in Gmail. Especially trying to email someone back after forwarding to someone else was a pain. I also felt like the actual room to reply got cut off if I typed more than a sentence. One nice thing though is you can easily pop out the reply into a mole — as I use Inbox I’m starting to get used to how to use it efficiently.
Notifications: The Android notifications are pretty similar to the regular ones just a little beefier. I wish there was an option to pin from the notification because this usually I’m on in transit on mobile so I can’t write back at that moment.
Reminders — I use my Inbox as a todo list, and I can finally add new items! I love the Google now integration. I would have loved Google Keep integration instead of reminders because I love using those colorful notes. Also it wasn’t really clear though where or when reminders who show up in my Inbox though — they appeared to me right in the midst of my email so it was hard to find them.
My Overall Impression
Inbox seems like it’ll be awesome for managing my email, but may need some work to make it just as efficient as actually then taking action for those emails. For some emails, I’m sure it’ll be easier — e.g. airlines, banking, anything where Gmail can provide an Assist. I haven’t needed it on Day 1, but I use it all the time in regular Gmail and Google Now.
There are still though the bread and butter regular emails where I just need to answer a question, send an intro, forward an interesting thought, or write a life update to a friend. For these, Inbox can get better, and I’m excited to see it happen!
I remember the Gmail leadership team a long time ago talking about this new direction and saying that to change something people are used to doing, it needs to be 10x worth it. It needs to be so cool and useful they still want it. This might just be that.
P.S. I don’t have invites yet, but if you recommend or comment I’ll try and send one your way when I get them!
