How can we help our users to organize their email?
✨ To get more context on Consider as a product, please visit here ✨
What / Labels is a way to tag and organize emails in your inbox. It retains your label system from Gmail and also syncs back to Gmail.
Why / Initially, we didn’t design/build labels because we believed in our core structure to be enough organization for our users. Over time, we got many messages from our users saying that it was a critical part of their workflow from Gmail.
Since our email client was synced from Gmail, it was important for us to meet that product parity so that from the business perspective, we didn’t lose our user base. Ultimately, it was important for us to unblock our users’ workflows.
Role / Designer, Product management, research.
Timeline / 2 weeks.
Team / Worked with 2 engineers.
✨ Below are the final designs that we shipped to our customers. It covers entry points from multiple perspectives of the product. ✨
How did we get here?
🔎 Research 📝
Got 15 minutes? Vent to us about email.
Before starting any designs, my design manager and I went to Sightglass coffee to casually chat with people about their general email habits and specifically how people organize their email to get a better sense of what kind of structure or lack-there-of that people have in their inbox. We sat at the upstairs communal table for 2 hours and got a chance to talk to 3 awesome people who volunteered their time for us.
The customer support specialist and I also went through intercom messages from our users to see if they’ve messaged anything related to labels, folders or the way they organize their email.
What were our main take-aways?
- Users use folders/labels as a way to filter through or search email
- Marking email based on type of email
- Why filter/search isn’t a good enough solution
- Some users view organizing email as a way of ‘tagging’
- Some users’ email habits are largely dependent on labels and folders
- Using it for later workflow
What did my exploration and process look like?
Below are some different visual directions I sketched out. The most difficult piece was thinking through our product system and finding non-intrusive, but discoverable places to incorporate labels.
How did we plan project scope?
I was responsible for deciding what is in scope and what is out of scope for the MVP version of Labels in Consider. I did this by collaborating with engineers on this project to see how long certain parts of the workflow will take.
This is a feature I thought was sneaky and smart, where you could label an email before you send it. Ultimately, we left it out of scope as it wasn’t critical for the main workflow.
Thinking through mobile
Retrieval use case is what we focused on for mobile where users will primarily use label filters found in search to find a collection of conversations based on the label category. We decided to leave out the creating and editing workflow because we made the assumption that those workflows wouldn’t be critical on mobile.