Two years ago, a team of engineers and designers on Google’s Gmail team decided that Gmail wasn’t cutting it.
Google’s signature
email program first hit the Web in 2004. In its earliest days, it was a
godsend to everyone who battled against a daily rush of messages.
But email has once
again become too onerous. There’s too much mail and it performs too many
functions in our lives. Email is a place for correspondence, for status
alerts from social networks and online stores and airlines, and a file
system for transferring and storing important documents. For many people
it’s also a to-do list and quasi-calendar, the central planner and task
manager for your day. And though it is tremendously useful and will never die, email is also, for many people, completely annoying.
So the Gmail team
decided to rethink email. “We decided, ‘What if we cleared our minds,
started fresh, and built something new to help people get back to what
mattered to them?’” said Alex Gawley, Gmail’s product director, in an
interview at Google’s headquarters. “What if we did more of the work for
them?”
The program that Mr. Gawley and his team have come up with is Inbox,
and Google on Wednesday plans to release a version for Android, iOS
devices and the web on an invitation-only basis. Inbox isn’t an upgrade
to Gmail. It’s a long-term replacement for it. Though Gmail isn’t going
anywhere — Inbox’s creators stressed that they love Gmail and that
Google plans to keep working on it — Inbox is meant to be your email
system for the next decade. You’ll sign into Inbox with your Gmail
account and you’ll see all your old messages there, and much of what you
do in Inbox will be reflected in Gmail. But Google expects most people
to use Inbox or Gmail, not both. In fact, both Mr. Gawley and Jason
Cornwell, Gmail’s lead designer, say they get their mail through Inbox,
not Gmail.
Photo
Google showed me an
in-depth demo of Inbox, but I wasn’t given a chance to use it on my own
email. What I saw of it looked interesting. Inbox replaces email’s
familiar main screen — a list of subject lines and senders — with more
thoughtfully designed previews of messages that share the overall
aesthetic of a social-networking feed. When your friend sends you some
photos, you see the pictures right on the main screen, and you can flip
through and dismiss them without going into the message.
Inbox also relies on
Google’s data-mining prowess to improve these highlights. For instance,
instead of showing you a message from your airline about your flight, it
shows you real-time information about that flight gathered from the
web. When you click on the highlight, you can always see the underlying
message, but if the software does its job well, you won’t have to click
on the message.
Finally, Inbox
functions as a to-do list. You can create tasks and reminders that
appear in your inbox alongside your messages. The tasks are super smart,
pulling in relevant data to make them useful. If you type “call my
dentist,” it might populate the task with your dentist’s phone number
and only her office hours.
Some of these features
aren’t completely novel. Inbox requires a series of gestures to
navigate and sort your messages, a system that feels similar to that of
Mailbox, an email start-up that was bought by Dropbox. (Box names are
popular in Silicon Valley.) It also automatically categorizes some of
your email in a way that Gmail and Outlook already do.
Overall, though,
there’s enough that’s new in Inbox that I’m eager to give it a long-term
whirl. I’ll report back if it improves how I deal with my messages, or
if it’s just another gloss on a eternal tech problem.
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