Gmail: Needle in a haystack and new vs. old
This is my second post in my Gmail UI rant series. I started this series to point out why I prefer Yahoo Mail over Gmail. I don’t think Yahoo Mail is perfect, but Gmail to me is just downright nutty, and has many-a-time left me feeling like a n00b, which is something that I really don’t think email should ever do to anyone except the elderly (that’s a joke, please no hate mail). This time I’m discussing the shortcomings in Google’s labels-instead-of-folders approach, and the difficulty in telling read messages from unread ones.
Separating the needle from the haystack
Gmail doesn’t have folders. Right off that bat gmail informed me of this, but to not worry because they have labels instead. They claim it’s better. Labels in gmail serve pretty much the same role though. In Yahoo Mail I have a “work” folder, but in gmail it’s a “work” label. In Yahoo mail, I can view the contents of my “work” folder, but with gmail I’d just view all emails with the “work” label. It’s pretty similar.But not really.
The big problem that makes Gmail impossible for me to use as my main email client: Gmail doesn’t allow individual emails to be labeled. I can only label the entire email thread. This is a horrible disadvantage because it means I can’t use labels to single out an important email. In every other email program in the world, when an email shows up in my inbox, I can move it to a folder so I can quickly find it later. Not with gmail. In effect, I can’t remove the needle from the haystack. This makes labels useless to me.
For example, I’ve been emailing with group of people representing a single client about a variety of issues with a project I’m working on with them. In a few of the the replies, they sent me websites they wanted me to check out. Normally I would move those two or three emails into a folder labled “3rd party” so I can check it out later. But gmail doesn’t let me do that. If I apply a “3rd party” label to the email, it’s applied to every single email with the same subject line -- the entire dialog, which in this case is perhaps two dozen emails or more, from a handful of different people on the project.
Labels are not a replacement for folders. It would make a great companion feature to folders, but it’s simply not the same thing. And I’m not complaining about labels/tags as much as gmail’s particular implementation of them. Oh, and their lack of folders, too.
Also, the first time I labeled an email I was surprised to see that it was still in my inbox. Yeah, that’s the power of labels -- an email can be in multiple places at once -- but it’s also a problem. I treat my inbox as a desktop. It’s not the place I store email , it’s just a place for new and unsorted messages. Dropping them in a folder is my way (and I would guess most people’s way) to organize their email. But with gmail labels, my inbox never unclutters. The labeled emails are still there. They’re just labeled. Apparently what I’m supposed to do here is archive them by clicking the Archive button, but I used gmail for months before getting that, and even now that I know it’s still an extra step.
New vs. old messages
One of the first things that confused me about gmail was how it presented coversation threads. It requires intimate knowledge of how gmail works to understand which emails are new and which ones are old. When I first started using gmail there was a painful learning curve to understand what I was seeing. I’m not sure why, because as the owner and operator of an active forum community, I am extremely familiar with the thread-based formatting.So what is gmail doing that made it so baffling to me? In the inbox view, gmail renders sender names from new messages in bold while sender names from old messages are not, like so:
You can see the first thread in the shot above is completely unread since all the names are in bold. The second line is partially old and partially new, and that’s pretty clear because some of them are bold, and some are not.
But when I click on that partially read thread, I see that all the email names show up in bold! What’s going on? How do I know which emails are new and which ones aren’t? Webfoums that use this kind of view make it pretty clear: they color them differently. But gmail is rendering them all the same.
With time I learned that gmail collapses emails that I’ve already read. Sometimes completely, and other times just so the name of the sender is visible, but I’m not quite sure why it chooses one method over the other. So, once I’ve uncollapsed expanded them, how can I tell which emails are read and which ones aren’t? If there’s a secret to it, someone please fill me in, because at this point I’m baffled. I get lost once I’ve expanded the topic (which I often do to get some context on what’s being discusses). Seeing what’s new vs. old is is quite clear when viewing my inbox using bold for new and plain for old, but why does gmail not carry that rendering style over to the coversation view?
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:56 am
Gmail rich text editor sucks. Also, I don’t know when Gmail is going to operate Google Docs so that one can send docs via email. Get what I mean?
October 21st, 2006 at 9:00 am
Gmail collapses read messages unless they are starred. If there are more than 6 collopsed messages in a row the names are also hidden (no header row).
I agree that there should be a way to tell if the message was unread from inside the conversation view.
Personally I think that the conversation view is the killer feature of Gmail and that is why I wont be able to switch to any other email client.
October 27th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
What I hate even more is this scenario: You have contextual filters set up to tag/label incoming emails, and when multiple-and-unrelated emails come in with the same subject line, ALL emails get collapsed into the same conversation and tagged with filters that might not relate to them. Like you said, there’s no way to un-tag/label individual emails. Argh. Thanks for the insightful post.
November 21st, 2006 at 12:56 pm
I think Gmail is the most clean and easy to use email UI thus far. The ability to use Google’s great search engine with my email makes it so that I don’t have to organize every last email, even though I do via Label. The concept of archiving is awesome you are the first person I’ve heard to have problems grasping it. With all the options out there, Gmail offers the most storage space and ease of use than anything else.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:54 am
wow. I am really amazed it took someone “months” to figure out how to archive a message.
given that maybe you haven’t figured out filters yet. they do the ‘move into a folder’ job for you. woohooo! I pray you can figure it out.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Ralph,
It’s not that it took me months to figure out how to archive; it’s that it took me months to figure out what archiving was and what it did. Since it’s something that other email programs don’t need, I didn’t realize what it was or why it was useful in gmail. It wasn’t obvious to me.
December 4th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
I am agree with your opinion…...
December 5th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Dude—this article makes you sound like a curmudgeon, complaining because gmail is “too new” and you want to do things the old way for no real reason—not realizing that the old way is worse.
I understand what you’re saying in the scenario about not being able to label individual messages. My answer is—so what? Label the conversation as “3rd party”. When you go back six months later to find that message, not only will you be able to find it, but you’ll be able to find all the context around it too, in the other messages. And you’ll be able to see what other labels you applied to the conversation. And if you just wanted that message all along, do a search.
If you’ve got conversations with 50 or more emails in it, might I suggest it’s time to change the subject line?
Labels can do everything folders can do, and more, and the conversation method dramatically reduces the number of clicks you need to find things.
December 9th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
John: Sorry, I didn’t see the notice on Gmail’s site that said it was not for curmudgeons.
Seriously though, when you say I want to do things “the old way for no real reason” it makes me think that perhaps you don’t understand the concept usability.
When a user is confused by a UI then the UI has failed. End of story. It doesn’t matter why. Exclaiming “so what?” isn’t really a solution.
All your workarounds you’ve mentioned are fine, but they’re just that: workarounds. Let me label a single email and I won’t have a complaint anymore. Make it clear what emails are new and which ones aren’t, and I won’t have a complaint anymore. It’s pretty straightforward.
December 24th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
If you want to label a specific email, and not the whole label, just create a label, and then forward that specific email to yourself. Here are the steps
1. Read email conversation, expanding all
2. Click forward under the email that you want to label
3. Give it a title that corresponds to a fliter you’ve already created (this saves you from having to then click the label on it after)
Seriously, once you get into having filters, even to yourself, corresponding to labels, gmail is an organisational dream. The only thing that bugs me about gmail is the slow login and logout times sometimes, as well as within but much less frequently.
January 11th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
You didn’t see the notice that Gmail isn’t for curmudgeons?
What did you think the new UI and the new user experience methods and the new ways of recruiting people to use Gmail were, if not signposts that you were entering a zone where things were going to be different?
I disagree that UI that confuses has failed. Sometimes it means that the user has failed, that he has misset expectations. I’m not upset that my car won’t fly like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it’s UI hasn’t failed because I can’t figure out how to make it do that, even if I’m expecting it to.
It inevitably takes a whole to grasp new use methods and concepts. At first, we try to do things just like we did before. Then we try to make metaphors and mental maps to wedge the new methods into what’s familiar to us, such as the workarounds you mention. Over time, we develop a suitable understanding of the new tools and eventually divest ourselves of the old school mechanisms which were actually holding us back, preventing us from seeing (and using) the new power available to us.
Or that’s the theory, anyway. I know that it does happen like that at times -- I’ve seen it with myself -- but also that sometimes we analyze the value and power vs. the pain and time required and we just say “screw it, I’m sticking with the old stuff.” And sometimes that’s fine (I still prefer POP e-mail and dealing with mailing lists and such via e-mail), sometimes we eventually shift over at a later point when we’re mentally more ready, and sometimes the rug gets pulled out from under us and we have no choice. (My new iMac won’t run Classic, period. Bye bye FrameMaker, sniff.)
I really doubt that I’ll even have a MySpace or FaceBook page, and I just don’t get del.ici.us or flikr or digg. So I don’t use them (yet) rather than that forcing myself to be frustrated by my lack of understanding of them.
January 11th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
The things in gmail I’m talking about aren’t nearly as drastic as assuming a car can fly. It’s more like I’m assuming the Gmail car has a radio -- because hey, every other car I’ve been in has. Please don’t tell me that assuming gmail can label a single email is like asking for a car to fly.
Outside of that, I completely understand what you’re saying Jim. I’ve shipped products with UI that required the user re-learn things. But that’s should never be a goal of a UI. What I shoot for is a UI that doesn’t fail, that doesn’t confuse, and is flexible enough so that people can move forward without having to temporarily take steps backward.
It’s that backwards step that too many designers and engineers don’t fight hard enough to get rid of, and it makes all the difference in the world. It’s not easy, especially with something so ingrained in our lives like email. But it’s the goal to shoot for.
When I test the UIs I work on and see users making little mistakes, I definitely don’t say “so what, they’ll get used to it”. If I were to do that, I’d be failing in my job as a UI designer. And sometimes we’ll test a UI and afterwards the test user will say “I wish it could do XYXY” -- when it already had XYXY implemented.
When that happens, did the user fail, or did the design team? I believe that the design team failed (although we take into consideration the target audience). If someone thinks the user failed, then I’d recommend them getting out of UI design
As for the curmudgeon comment, I was being sarcastic as a reply to John. I think bad UI gets more slack than it should … and getting comments from users who say “so what, get used to it!” proves that. We shouldn’t have to settle for that. I don’t, especially when it comes from a heralded company like Google.
March 13th, 2007 at 1:58 am
I agree with all the points raised by Hanford.
I took a gmail account because someone forwarded the invite.
I stopped using that piece of crap after sending/receiving a dozen mails or so.
I stopped using hotmail 5 years ago.
I’m more than happy with my yahoo account, esp the new beta which is similar to outlook. Its comfortable, intuitive and makes me happy.
If a UI does not make sense the first time you use it then its completely useless. Its not like flying a plane where you absolutely have to learn something.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:48 am
GMail sucks. I serious don’t get why people like it at all.
Searching email works fine on Yahoo and you can even have multiple searches at the same time easily and without thought (I suppose you can do that on gmail IF you remember to open the search in a new window but why should have to remember that. Yahoo’s way just works, no extra thought at each step required.
Same with composing, replies etc. In gmail you either have to remember to open the reply in a new window OR you have to press the special button to tell gmail to do it for you. Why? Yahoo it just works, no extra steps.
There’s lots of other things Yahoo mail does OBJECTIVELY better than GMail. As far as I can tell most gmail lovers are fanboys, shouting out praise without any critical thought. At least that’s how it seems. Gmail looks like a crappy crypitc UI out of a 1980s DOS program. Why would anyone want to go back to that era?
March 30th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Gregg, I do think Gmail has some good stuff going for it. It’s super-fast, especially it’s search. But something that I read on another site summed it up really well: Gmail is great if you want to use email the way Google thinks you should.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:09 am
I just “archived” all the family ancestry search related emails I’ve recieved over the past couple weeks. I just lost several weeks of work, and my ancestors along with it, because…..I CANT find where they are ARCHIVED
This features sucks. I don’t understand how gmail works--you need a PHD in software to figure out this stuff. Ready to go back to my spam addled Yahoo account…....at least I can find what I’ve put in my folders.
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I’m going to have to disagree.
99% of the complaints I’ve seen from people about Gmail aren’t a result of Gmail being a bad application, but are because these people want Gmail to function exactly like some older application and refuse to even attempt to adapt. You’re trying desperately to pull on a door that clearly says push.
Labels work fine as a replacement to folders. Google places the emphasis on conversations, not on individual emails: labels applying to the entire conversation is an intentional design choice. If you need to look for specific information, make use of the Star It feature (which can apply to individual messages) and Gmail’s extremely useful Search feature. If I’m not mistaken, one of their taglines was Gmail: Search Don’t Sort.
Figuring out what the Archive button does requires all of 15 seconds.
I agree with you about new vs old messages: new mail should be bolded from within a conversation view.
June 23rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Courthead: I agree, but a good UI designer sees people pulling on a door that says push and says “Hmmm, people are pulling on this door when it’s supposed to be pushed. We should fix that.”
And then we do.
August 11th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
“If you’ve got conversations with 50 or more emails in it, might I suggest it’s time to change the subject line?”
Yes. What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know that YOU are supposed to adapt to the user interface? The user interface isn’t supposed to adapt to the… erm… user. The user must adapt to it. If the user finds the user interface difficult, it’s the user’s fault.
Actually, in Gmail, it’s called the Google Interface—the GI. See, the GI does what it does, and the users must learn to adapt to the obvious superiority of GI.