“So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think ‘of course it’s that way, why would it be any other way?’ It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.” – Jony Ive
Scanning by name and not by subject
The initial draft featured the subject as line 1. Line 1 is important because it’s the anchor that you’d use to scan the Inbox for information. At the workplace you tend to communicate, predominantly, with the same, small group of people. To use this similar set of names as anchors to distinguish between messages seemed counter intuitive.
(left) It’s repetetive when you scan by participants. (right) It’s more informative when you scan by the content of the messages.
But the same design fared badly for most personal accounts where it seemed overwhelming to scan by subject.
We decided to play safe and anchor by subject. The risk wasn’t worth the reward. This is something that we want to revisit in the future. We still believe we can do better here and that our initial exploration can lead somewhere more meaningful.
Round peg in a round hole
The left edge of the text block isn’t ragged – this creates a well defined space for the star or the timestamp. So that’s how we laid out the screen.
Once we studied the elements of a message block, it became obvious that there was one set of essential information and another set of information/controls that seemed distinctly secondary.
The essential information was the message – the subject, the participants and an excerpt. The secondary information was the star, the timestamp, and the attachment indicator.
We knew the essential content. And we knew the most prominent piece of screen real estate. The situation was reduced to a simple case of putting a round peg in a round hole. It’s nice when things work out like that.
Actions in the swipe panel
Our initial design had 5 actions for each message. After building the app we realised that the frequency of archiving, deleting and marking a message far exceeded the frequency of replying or forwarding that message.
Further, ‘Delete, Archive and Mark as Read’ have a logical relationship that lets the mind group it as a single entity. Once you throw reply and forward into the mix, then, because of the logical break, it goes from one entity to five entities.
Using a problem to add colour
(left) The colour stripe in all inboxes indicates the account. (right) The account colour acts as the selected state in 'edit’ and the background for the swipe panel
Simplicity isn't always simple
It took a lot of iterating to arrive at the design. It’s embarrassing for us to dig through the archives but this just seems to be the way interface design works: you keep on keeping on. And you make sure you’re nice to the developers!
I love this quote. I was introduced to it when I saw it tattoo’d on recent Australian Open champion Stanislas Wawrinka’s arm. The current state of the Inbox is our best failure. We’ll just keep on keeping on.
