I recently started using my Gmail account for more than the occasional website subscription and have now made it my email client of choice. Sure I might be a little late on the uptake (for a web designer anyway) but I didn’t think I needed. It was one of those cases where I thought the current system was not that broken so really what could be done to improve it. Boy has it changed my view of email clients though and wow, what an amazing online application!. It is a thing of beauty on many levels:

Conversations changed my view of emails

Conversations were the hardest thing to get used to about Gmail but I think they are the best thing about it. Instead of viewing emails as individual elements, viewing them as a part of a wider conversation make live much easier. It means you:

• Have better context to an email by having the email history quickly on hand,
• Can still view and treat emails as individual items, and last but certainly not least
• You have a much more manageable inbox!

Labels work for me

I realise labels (or tags) are not for everyone or every application but they work for me, particularly in email. I often have emails that related to many different subjects and the traditional linear hierarchy just doesn’t work for me. Labels do.

Start replying to an email instantly

There are also little efficiency gains everywhere – like the fact there is no need to press reply to reply to an email, just click in the already shown field and start typing your reply.

Changing a Reply email to a Reply all is as simple as clicking a tab

How many times have you hit the reply button and gotten half way through the email only to realise you actually should have replied to all? Well I’ve done it loads of times and have then had to copy what I had written and paste it into the new reply all email. I imagine this happened to the designers of Gmail too because it’s no longer an issue if you use Gmail. Oops, I meant to reply to everyone, I’ll just change that tab:

And then there’s all those little things that make a big difference

• Recognising addresses in an email and linking them through to Google Maps,
• Recognising dates/events and linking them through to Google Calendar,
• The keyboard shortcuts that greatly improve efficiency,
• Creating and managing links in an email,
• The reply field expanding when you click in it,
• The detach message to new window option,
• The print email function,
• The confirmation/message area at the top of the page,

I doubt the wider population, already attuned to a Microsoft way of life, will flock to it in their droves but it has certainly raised the bar for what is possible with both email and online applications in general for me.

All in all hats off to the designers and developers, I’m very impressed!

This is a very interesting article about how Google has become the most popular brand of today without really “building” their brand as such (i.e they have not bombarded us with traditional ads). It asks the question of the future of branding/advertising as we know it.

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/02/the_shrinking_advantage_of_bra_1.html

Being completely anal here, I hate it when I get the option to chose a language when installing new software and I get a drop-down menu saying “English (United States)”. This gives me the impression that I can chose a different version of English – like my preference for Australian or British. More often than not though, when I click on the drop-down I get the following options:

I.e. there is no other versions of English to choose from. It’s the false hope that gets me.

Is anyone else frustrated by this or am I just being anal?

And it’s certainly a sign of the times when the predominant English language is America’s.