Dear Inbox by Gmail, You’ll Be Missed
Although Gmail now has some of its best features, Inbox’s pure UI and revolutionary approach to email workflow are unmatched.
When Google announced last week that it was shuttering its other webmail app, Inbox by Gmail, there was, from a small but hardcore subset of users, a wailing and gnashing of teeth. I’m one of those mourners. Inbox by Gmail was an incredibly designed app that revolutionized my email workflow, and while many of its features are now part of Gmail, Inbox’s UI purity and design philosophy will be sorely missed.
In a way, it’s easy to understand why Google killed off Inbox by Gmail. Except for die-hards like me, most people seemed to view the app as Google’s test bed for future Gmail updates. In the end, that’s exactly what Inbox ended up being: Most of its best features (like its ability to bundle email by content type, snooze emails for later, or send an AI-generated Smart Reply) have become integrated into Gmail as core features over time.
But Inbox was much more than just a design sandbox. It was a product designed from top to bottom around a totally different way of thinking about email.
Tracing their lineage all the way back to the 1970s and ARPANET, most modern email clients evolved from the quaint UI metaphor of the writing desk. In the earliest apps like Eudora, emails were treated like letters and postcards. There were little cubbies for incoming and outgoing letters, a shelf for your address book, drawers for your files, and a little wastepaper basket on the side to throw away anything that wasn’t important. When new letters come in, you were meant to sit down, read each one, write a response, and then file the letter away or throw it out. And if you didn’t get to it right away, that was OK; it could sit on your desk, opened, for a few days until the housekeeping mood struck.
Of course, extending such a metaphor for email now appears laughably naive. It makes the assumption that the average person only receives a few letters a day, and that the signal-to-noise ratio of their correspondence is pretty much 1:1. But the reality of email in the 21st century is that the writing desk has exploded. Even for a light email user, the signal-to-noise ratio of incoming emails is closer to 0:1 than 1:1. Seventy-four trillion emails are sent every year; the average office worker receives 120 a day, not including spam.
Boasting Google’s then-fresh Material Design language, Inbox was more than just a fresh coat of paint on Gmail’s old shell; it was an attempt to reframe what an email was.
Which is what made Gmail such a breath of fresh air when it first hit the scene in 2004 and allowed you to filter your email as easily as you searched the Web. By bringing its search algorithms to bear on the problem, Google had finally provided a meaningful constraint on the informational chaos that email had become. And when it was unveiled in 2015, Inbox by Gmail took that a step further. Boasting Google’s then-fresh Material Design language, Inbox was more than just a fresh coat of paint on Gmail’s old shell; it was an attempt to reframe what an email was.
Taking a page from the Getting Things Done time-management method, Inbox didn’t treat emails like letters or postcards. It treated them like tasks: Messages that make demands on your time and need to be acted on in some way. So Inbox by Gmail treats your messages like entries on a checklist, and the UI is designed so you can tick off those tasks as easily as possible, primarily by emphasizing two buttons: the checkmark, which marks an email or bundle of emails as “done” by archiving it, and the pin, which keeps an email in your inbox even if the bundle containing it is otherwise marked as done.
So let’s say you receive 24 emails in a day. First, Inbox by Gmail would group all those emails together in a bundle called “Today.” That bundle might have sub-bundles, like “Finance” or “Low Priority.” Regardless of whether it’s an individual email or a bundle, though, in Inbox by Gmail, you can designate something as “done” just by hitting a checkmark to the left. So just by ticking off “Today,” all 24 emails would be swept into your archive and marked in red. But there’s probably a few emails in there you need to reply to, so click the pin button on those, then click the checkmark next to “Today.” You’ve gone from 21 to three emails in your inbox. One you can’t respond to until Monday, so you snooze it; one just requires a rote “Thanks!” so you just click an auto-respond button; and the final email you take a few minutes to send a reply to. You’ve gone from Inbox 24 to Inbox Zero in less than five minutes.
If you’re a Gmail user who has never embraced Inbox, you’re probably saying: Big Deal. Gmail can do that. Its analog to the checkmark button is the archive button; its version of the pin is the star. It has snooze now and Smart Reply buttons. All of that’s true. But Gmail’s interface is not built around these affordances the way that Inbox’s UI is, and that makes a difference. Combined with the app’s email bundling abilities, the way Inbox lets those tiny, well-placed pin and checkmark buttons do all the heavy lifting creates an outsized butterfly effect in how efficiently you can process your email.
None of which is to say that Gmail is inferior in any way to Inbox. It’s quite obviously an amazing product, and the new Gmail design unveiled earlier this year is better and more powerful than ever. But it does represent an irreconcilable difference in approach to email than the one that Inbox by Gmail espoused. Because there’s two types of people out there: Those who feel like they’re drowning in an ocean of email, and those who are comfortable floating on top. If you’re a floater, Gmail is your luxury yacht: It’s got everything you need to live and thrive comfortably at sea. But if you’ve ever felt like you’re drowning, you’re only going to be happy when you’re on dry land.
And that was Inbox. It was the broom that swept back the sea.
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