Here’s a simple solution to a UI issue I face on a regular basis: add a ‘tab’ interface for Gmail to help users find things in their inboxes while they’re writing an email. This is a very Mark-inspired post.
I use Gmail a lot–I really like its interface and features [especially the 'send mail as' feature]. I often find myself writing emails and then–BOOM!–I need information that’s in another email:
-I need to reread an email I sent out previously.
-I need to ’search’ for someone’s name or email address that I can’t get to pop up automatically.
-I need to quickly pan between two emails using information from one to sort out the other.
Here are a few solutions I’ve tried — let me know of any more that are out there:
-The ‘Save Drafts’ feature allows you to easily save the email you’re typing and return to your inbox to sort out information you need. This works well but adds multiple clicks to the process making it pretty hard to scan quickly back and forth between two emails.
-The ‘make new window’ button at the top-righthand corner of the email will pop up a new browser window just with your email, while the main window reverts back to your inbox. This works on a basic level, but then I have to deal with window formatting and in the end, the pop-up feels like a pop-up.
-Simply create a new browser tab of Gmail and have two instances of the website working simultaneously. This is the solution I use most often but it seems to me inelegant, but luckily doesn’t appear to screw anything up in terms of functionality.
It would be interesting to experiment with a simple tabbing system, one that allowed you to quickly scan between two emails, an email and a search result, or an email and your contacts list,. Keyboard shortcuts would be great (I’m really digging iTerm right now for terminal windows).
The overarching theme I believe I’ve stumbled upon here is that as Gmail contains increasingly important user information and has the awesome powers to mine that data efficiently. I feel myself more and more in need to find things in past emails in my attempts to create new ones. In an abstract sense, Gmail could be a better facilitator between my wealth of knowledge and those of my friends. I’m not sure if the last sentence actually makes sense, but it’s close.
I think that a simple tab bar above ‘Archive’ button line would do well. Maybe the tabs would be expansive: you could have an inbox in one, an email progressing in the second, a search result in the third, contacts in the fourth, etc. Or a wild idea is to integrate the various Google programs that are spawning: in one webpage and in one login you could have access to your calendars, email, documents, and usenet groups–all via tabs. Maybe I’ll tackle that question in another post.
