Google Inbox — A flagrantly unjustified critique by a non-designer who couldn’t do better if his life depended on it

Originally posted 30th October, 2014

I recently got my invite to the new Google Inbox and thought I’d write up my thoughts on it.

Very Good — Minimal UI

The UI is much less cluttered, you can see in the screenshots below.

Bad — Bundled Categories in the Inbox

Edit: I’ve since found that if you open pull-out menu (from the top left icon) and scroll down, select settings, one can (de)select which categories are bundled in the inbox. This almost goes too far, for after doing so, when I do want to see them, I now have to open said menu then scroll down to the category.

When automatic message categorization was introduced to Gmail it was brilliant.

All of a sudden that mass of spammy emails from systems instead of people that were drowning out the emails I actually cared about, were diverted out of my inbox to their own tabs.
At a glance, the most-recent were summarized in the tab headings, so without even clicking the tab I had some idea of what was in there.

And the categorization was very very good. If it ever did get one wrong, simply dragging the miscategorized email to the correct tab fixed this (and all future classification).

My inbox once again contained just the important emails I cared about.

With Inbox those tabs are gone, and are moved into my list of messages in my Inbox as Bundles. Bad move because:

• These are now mixed in with — and consuming real estate which otherwise could be used by — the emails I actually care about
• Since they are now mixed in with my Inbox messages their position is inconsistent; cognitive load is higher to both ignore (most of the time) or locate “the Social bundle”

Gmail, with categorized emails in tabs:

Inbox, with categorized emails as bundles. You can see how much more real estate they’re hogging:

Bad — Command-Enter when composing is no longer a shortcut for “Send”

Perhaps this was just me as a mouse-averse “power user”, but I used this all the time.

Bad — Emails are now considered as “Tasks to Do”

Inbox now breaks emails down by day, like a task list, and “delete” has been replaced with “mark as done”. This might be handy if you’re going for Inbox Zero. Not so good for the rest of us.

I really dislike the paradigm of treating all emails as tasks which require action.
Having to read that out-of-hours “urgent” email from the boss is intrusive enough, but it’s now considered a task requiring my action.
The follow-on change, replacing “delete” with “done”, changes what is a widely known and understood action for all email users (delete), for no good reason.

Good — Minimal Threaded Conversation View

Something begun in Google Wave, and done better by (sadly now defunct) fluent.io.

Email threads now look like a chat, with smart default collapsing, initially only showing the most-recent email in the thread. Prior emails in the thread are collapsed into a double-line divider, with a circle over its left-hand side containing the number of emails therein Very nice:

You can see the user icons from Gmail are also preserved (now in Circle Form).
Good move, they’re much easier on the brain than checking headers for who said what.

Clicking the divider (or the number indicator circle) expands emails in the thread to summaries:

Clicking a summary expands the full text of the email:

Good — Kept the ‘collapse quoted text in responses’ ellipsis

Whoever introduced this was a genius — no more “Half screen of useful reply followed by 10 screens of quoted prior emails”. Very glad this was kept. But then, they’d be insane to not do so =)

So there it is. It’s pretty cool. But for now I prefer Gmail, largely due to the Tabs-to-Bundles shift.