Few things are certain in life, but one of them is: you’ll eventually have an email account. You will check it almost every single day, for many years, and it will be your key to access numerous sites and services.
Why is it, then, that people are always unhappy about their emails?
The general feeling about emails
People don’t like their emails. When asked about it, most of them say that it is overwhelming, packed with spam, poorly organized and just plain terrible.
But how is it that emails became this necessary evil?
Most of what we get in our inboxes (other than spam) are things we signed up for, things that relate to our routines and interests, that are somehow a curated selection of topics that shape our lives. It should be a repository of what matters to us, instead of an obligation we need to check every now and then.
The funny thing is, since Microsoft released Hotmail back in 1996, not much has changed. Emails services remained pretty much the same, while their usage became more frequent with each passing year.
Now, with the use of smartphones, we carry emails everywhere we go, so having a good experience is essential to make sure we can get things done without the feeling of being forced to sail through a sea of unwanted information to get to the thing we were looking for.
Why is it that we don’t like emails?
We asked several people and most answers related to these four topics:
- their inboxes were always full of unwanted emails and spam;
- they have trouble finding what they need;
- they don’t know how to organize all the incoming messages;
- they find it hard to manage folders, tags, or even multiple accounts
We also asked what they did in order to minimize these problems, and the answers we got were:
- most people have more than one account, for different subjects;
- many of them use flags and stars to highlight important emails;
- some organize incoming messages in folders;
- a few delete almost everything to avoid clutter.
Other than that, we also found out people often send themselves emails, to keep track of links, articles, documents, and files they want to check later.
Are emails the solution, after all?
Well, at a certain point it became clear that people use their emails for a bunch of different reasons, many of which could indeed be solved in other ways.
So, if checking emails is so overwhelming, why do people keep using it as their primary channel to get these things done?
First of all, they said they trust their emails.
“An email is something you keep for life. I have had my emails for almost 15 years now.” — quote from the interviews
Second, it is easy to use this one service for all these things, instead of accessing a handful of other apps and sites to get the same results.
So, if people choose to use emails to do all these things, how can we make their experience a better one?
Before we started we needed to find the common denominator between all these uses.
To make a long story short, we could say that people use their emails to access services and get updates on topics of their interest.
With this, we could understand what problem statement we needed to work on.
“how might we create a good experience for people to have their personal emails organized, without constant maintenance to keep track of topics of their interest and easily find what they need?”
Coming up with a solution
From our research, we knew what we wanted to focus on:
- Creating a fun and pleasurable experience for people;
- Optimizing their organization.
To do so, we split our ideation process in two.
1. Creating a fun and pleasurable experience
Most email services available nowadays are not fun. Gmail, one of the most popular providers among our interviewees, is full of resources and tools, but it looks and feels pretty much like any other email out there.
Hey is an alternative that is closer to our definition of fun. It has an innovative interface, it’s colorful and even the inbox is called “imbox”, in an attempt to reshape the whole emailing experience.
Other email providers we found focused more on encrypting messages and other safety concerns than on the actual experience of the user.
1.1 Our take on fun
The feeling that an email is something you keep for life stayed in our minds. We wanted to work on the idea of having this service as a long-life companion, instead of another impersonal service we need to access just to get things done.
That’s how we came up with the idea of the whale, an animal that lives a life almost as long as ours and that could be a cute mascot for the app.
We also wanted the color scheme to be meaningful, so the app is all white and gray, and all use of color is purposeful, as in identifiers for folders, usability states, and visual feedback of actions.
Other than that, we wanted to make sure the app’s communication was always light and fun, like a conversation with the user.
2. Optimizing organization
Two of the most common complaints people had were:
- There are too many unwanted messages in their inboxes;
- They don’t like having to put emails on folders all the time, as it is too much work to maintain.
2.1 Getting rid of unwanted messages
First thing first. For us, it was very important to make sure people’s emails could be sort of a safe space. No unwanted messages, no spam from lists you’ve been unwillingly subscribed to, no emails from unknown senders.
To do so, we took one of our favorite features from Hey and implemented it in our own product: having to authorize new senders.
So every time you get an email from a new sender you choose to either accept or block them from your inbox.
2.2 Creating an easy way to keep things organized
People love the idea of folders but don’t like having to actually put emails in there. Our solution? Automating this process.
How it works: whenever you get an email from a new sender and decide to keep it, you need to decide where the emails from this particular sender go to.
Then every time you get an email from them, their message is directly forwarded to the chosen folder.
And if the email comes from a sender you don’t recognize or accept, swiping left easily blocks them from your inbox.
And since we realized people receive many more emails than they send, we also wanted to keep items such as “drafts”, “sent”, “trash” and “spam” hidden from view, prioritizing folders of incoming messages.
Also, there was the possibility of you receiving an email and having to move it to a different folder.
For this scenario, we thought about a person that receives an email about their spouse about wedding arrangements. This email is automatically forwarded to a “personal” folder but can be moved to a “wedding” folder to make sure messages from the same topic stay together.
Since we had multiple folders in our navigation, we realized it’d be important to have an easy way to visualize every email that need to be replied. So we set a button on the nav bar that takes the user directly to the list of emails they need to “reply later”. With this, it would also be possible to minimize the number of messages marked as “unread”, as they would now have their own place to stay and be easily checked.
Last, but not least, we knew how important it was for users to find messages with ease, so we implemented a search bar inside each folder. This way, when looking for a keyword users won’t be confronted with results from all other folders.
(for this example we used the “my notes” folder, which is where all the emails the users send themselves go to.)
How would that look on a desktop?
Since we designed mobile-first, rethinking the interface to make it fit in a browser was quite a challenge.
We wanted to maintain the folders in view and keep the aesthetics true to the mobile version. That meant having buttons such as “write emails” and “reply later” detached from the folder list and visible on any screen.
Next steps and takeaways
Our project is still a prototype that needs to be tested more times before reaching its final version.
We had the first round of testing and got feedback that already helped improve the usability. The desktop version, though, needs to be tested, still, for us to check what difficulties users may encounter.
There are also many other settings that would need to be discussed, regarding the use of users’ personal information and their privacy. Since this project was just a study, we didn’t feel the need to prioritize these topics just yet, so keep in mind that there may be some flaws still.
Other than that, we were really proud of the result we reached. Our eyes shone with the idea of trying to make emails better for anyone and we felt thrilled to realize this is a universal problem, not just our own perception.
After finishing this project, it was actually kind of sad having to go back to my plain non-whale email, I have to say. But knowing there is a place for improvement makes me hopeful that one day our emails will be less like an overwhelming list of different-themed messages we don't really want and more like a lifetime companion that helps us keep track of what matters in all stages of life. And who knows, maybe it could be with wale.mail after all.