I love reading newsletters, I currently subscribe to about 10 or so covering a variety of topics like literature, design, creative thinking and art. I think they're a great way to catch up on current events, tap into internet culture, learn or just simply unwind. Because I read and subscribe to so many newsletters, I also need & want to organize and manage them effectively.

With my primary email client, Gmail, I sought to create a system using the features provided that could enhance my experience, but could never find something that worked well enough for me. Labels felt to rigid and clunky, setting up rules and filters didn't make much sense and I found Gmail's AI enabled categories (promotions, social...etc) wrongly categorizing my subscriptions to be quite frustrating. Due to this confusion I decided to take on Gmail as a design challenge and explore solutions that could make Gmail more conducive to newsletters.

Research consisted of 1:1 semi-structured interviews with Gmail users who subscribe to 10 or more newsletters. The main goals of the research project was to learn:

The research data provided several insights into a user's everyday experience of Gmail, specifically when it comes to organization and managing clutter. However, it did not provide much evidence to support a design of a newsletter management feature.

A full write up of the research insights can be found here.

The quote above is from my mentor, the wonderful Flora Baik. Without strong supporting research I felt like I was going in circles, constantly asking myself "what problem was I trying to solve?". I had let my own needs dictate the design. Instead of paying close attention to the research and designing for the users, I was designing for myself.

Going through my Miro board, I noticed a grouping I had previously ignored relating to Gmail's suite of organizational features.

A commonality amongst users was that they found trouble utilizing Gmail's primary organizational tools, which consists of both labels & the tab views. Labels especially were a particular source of confusion; users found it un-intuitive to use, redundant at times and occasionally restrictive.

The decision to address this issue can be summarized by the statement below:

Labels are tags that you add to your emails to keep them organized in a certain way. You can use any name and color for the labels as you desire.

Interviewed users perceive labels as folders and either try to use them as such or are put off by it's un-intuitiveness. The act of using labels is motivated solely by the need to archive emails into singular groups/folders rather than tagging them.

In the aforementioned paper, Gmail cites that the benefits of labels are: an Email can have multiple label assignments and labels allow Emails to be easily located within the inbox using the search feature. Comparing these points with observed user behavior I noticed that:

Content in this sense means information that's typically found in an email. The usual suspects here are important texts like quotes, passwords, to-do lists & links such as articles, videos, photos, etc. For my first round of designs, I started off thinking about how content once saved to a label will appear to the user. The final design direction needed to be flexible and congruent with Gmail's current visual & functional aesthetic.

The previous exploration would require a lot of functional changes to the Gmail eco-system, I wanted to avoid doing that if possible. Any new changes should have a low implementation overhead and shouldn't stray too far from the current visual language.

Positives: 3 out of 5 users found it very helpful and were pleasantly surprised because they weren't expecting that this was something they would need.

Pain-points: Finding labelled content under the label was difficult. Not very discoverable when the CTA is collapsed as default.

Nice to haves: An easy way to go back/reference the original email.

Likelihood of user adoption: Likely but with caveats. 3 out of 5 users would prefer having this feature as a standalone and not coupled with labels.

Updates: Updated the labelled items CTA to default to open instead of closed, added a go-to-email button on labelled items component.

Custom label tabs are a reaction to Gmail's current fixed AI enabled tabs (social, promotions, updates). It equips users with the ability to create their own custom tabs with labels. User's can prioritize their most important labels by giving them heightened visibility.

The second iteration takes advantage of Gmail's current tabs design interaction model to ensure it was easy to learn, use and be highly discoverable.

Positives: Easy & straight forward to use, clever and would add value especially for work.

Pain-points: User's wouldn't necessarily know what "Add New Label View" CTA means

Nice to haves: Including the Gmail label icon would help strengthen the association.

Likelihood of user adoption: Very likely. 4 out of 5 user's found this more accessible and useful than the creating multiple inboxes. User's understood they can prioritize their favorite labels, and loved the idea of having more flexible control over their inbox tabs.

Updates: Standardized label icons across the UI to improve the association between labels & Tabs, updated CTA copy to "Add new label tab".

Currently, the way to create a rule is through a filter using the search bar, a path that has been cited as un-intuitive and hard to discover from research. This feature explores how to make this easier to accomplish through the use of labels.

If the common need is to create a rule that auto applies a label to an email with the sender address being the determining criteria, it should be possible to give the user this option during the rule application process.

On selecting a label in the menu, a prompt appears asking a user if they would like to create an auto assign rule based on their current selection. Users can also accomplish this task by dragging an email either into a label tab or side menu. In this case, the primary CTA appears as a snack-bar prompt.

Positives: Intuitive, straightforward and easy to use.

Pain-points: Users had trouble understanding how rules worked. Wasn't sure what criteria was being used to set up the rule.

Nice to haves: User's want a way to specify that a labelled email should be removed from their inbox.

Likelihood of user adoption: Some fine-tuning may be needed since ruled are a very complex feature. Users specified they found it a less clunky alternative than filtering, and would use the dragging method more frequently.

Updates: Provided more context on the criteria rules are based on by changing copy of the CTA and added corresponding snackbar feedback.

There are no direct sorting/grouping features in Gmail. Users can opt into alternative email views, some of which offer a level of grouping but not much intuitive control for the user. Users can also utilize search to create grouping parameters (using: label:[label name] &/or label:[label name]). This feature is not very discoverable or easy to grasp for a majority of users. None of my interviewed users were aware of it's existence.

Grouping allows users to organize by status or by labels without shifting focus from the primary email view. Users can comfortably manipulate their primary inbox while still being able to easily to return to their preferred default state. This feature is accessed through a new icon on the primary tool bar to ensure it's visible and accessible to the user.

Positives: Easy to use, would be useful especially grouping by status, pleased with the way the results are presented.

Pain-points: Users were initially unsure of the icon being used but expressed that it's something they could easily learn with continued use.

Nice to haves: One user would have liked the option to choose between 'and' and 'or' operations when grouping by status. Other nice to haves were: mass E-mail selection and combining status selection with labels.

Likelihood of user adoption: Not likely, 4 out of 5 users cite that they don't usually have a need to group by labels and their label folders are sufficient enough for their needs. Grouping by status received more support than grouping by labels and could potentially be adopted by users but more testing is needed to verify this.

Updates: None

Gmail is a massive and complicated product with different types of users and behaviors associated with it. The ideas presented here are not perfect in any way shape or form, nor are they intended to be. To take this project further it would be helpful to keep testing with an even larger set of users and also do more segmenting of the research demographic to cover multiple user archetypes. I enjoyed working through this project as a thought exercise, and it's definitely sparked an interest in going further in interaction design.

While the end result of this project was definitely not as flashy as designing a full blown newsletter reader, it taught me the importance of "boring design". Boring design according to designer & writer Tobias Van Schneider means "focusing on the things that aren't seen or immediately appreciated, but can have an equal or even greater impact as "the cool stuff." Some of the most positively received features were the label tabs & rule creation features which involved small changes to existing designs. This project also taught me to think about the wider business and product vision and how to design in accordance to that.