Google Inbox missed the chance to save e-mail, but it could still save the internet.
Just like its greatest feature, Inbox is DONE.
It finally happened. Inbox is dead. As of this month, not even five years after its launch, Google is shutting down its alternative e-mail app, Inbox, and rerouting its users to Gmail. Google will tout Inbox as a success, emphasizing how many of its features are now integrated into Gmail. But if you look beneath the surface of Google’s hype, you might see something else. Inbox was supposed to be more than a skunkworks for new features. At one point, Google clearly intended to change e-mail itself.
In the end, Inbox did not change e-mail. Beyond introducing a couple of features, it barely even changed Gmail. Inbox was hyped as something big, and it certainly had the potential to be big, but instead, it died out with a whimper, and the world of e-mail will go on more or less as though Inbox had never happened.
While you may be inclined to see this as just one more of Google’s failed (or even successful) experiments, the fact that Inbox did not fundamentally change e-mail is more significant than you realize. We needed Inbox to succeed.
The missing revolution
Born in the 1960s, e-mail has survived this long because it is not beholden to tech fads, nor dependent upon proprietary platforms run by hipster man-children. E-mail is lumbering, cantankerous, and profoundly uncool. If someone sends you a message and it reaches your inbox, you never have to worry about it disappearing because they “unsent” it. You can access it through any application or website that uses the right protocols. It feels like something that was conceived by old school nerds in a drab government laboratory, rather than a cabal of banana-bearded dipshits working from coffeeshops.
The downside to e-mail’s stubborn longevity is that e-mail still carries decades of legacy user experience. To illustrate what I mean, look at the latest Gmail interface, which is what will be replacing Inbox:
That lack of white space and wall-to-wall layout are straight out of 1991. It’s really hard to believe this is supposed to be the cutting edge of online communication. It’s easy to forget that Gmail was cutting-edge when it launched in 2004.
Aside from its (then) massive one gigabyte storage limit, Gmail’s biggest contribution to the UX of e-mail was the concept of threaded messages. It’s almost impossible to imagine a time when every single message in your inbox was its own separate item, and to read through a particular exchange of replies, you would have to manually locate and open each message. It was positively barbaric. Gmail brought e-mail into the 21st century.
Going back a little further, the last major upgrade to the UX of e-mail before Gmail was the concept of webmail, which was brought to the public in 1995. Before e-mail became available in your web browser, you had to configure a desktop client (like Microsoft Outlook) to run on your machine and it took a little technical know-how to do it. When you did, the messages would be downloaded right to your computer, so if you got a virus-ridden attachment, the onus was on you to scan it, unless a hard drive reformat was on your agenda. And if you wanted to access your e-mail on another computer, you had to do the whole setup process all over again. Webmail did away with all that bullshit.
Just as e-mail was brought into the 1990s with webmail and the 2000s with threaded messages, we should have seen a corresponding revolution in the 2010s. Those who remember the hype of Google Wave probably expected it would be that very revolution. Unfortunately, Wave was far too much, far too soon, and launched as ham-fistedly as Google+. By contrast, the sensible shoes revolution of Inbox moved the cheese just enough to be worth the effort. So what went wrong?
The raison d’etre of Inbox
Each major revolution in e-mail solved an important problem of the age. In the 1990s, e-mail was a geeky endeavor that posed hazards to those without savvy. Webmail addressed that. In the 2000s, inboxes were cluttered nightmares, beset by spam and legitimate communications alike. Threaded messages and functional spam filters addressed that. By the 2010s, the big problem to solve was fast becoming the clutter in the user’s mind.
Between mobile push notifications, tabbed browsers, and the raging river of cognitive diarrhea that is social media, technology users are beset with more information than they can consume. All of that is on top of the information being funneled through your inbox. At the launch of Google Inbox, most of your digital communications were still centered on your e-mail. Therein lay the opportunity for Inbox.
To understand that opportunity, you need to understand the cognitive principle behind the paralysis caused by information overload. If you have ever had a day where you had so many things to do that you didn’t even know where to start and ended up getting nothing done at all, then you will understand the issue. Your inbox represents a list of things you must do: people to reply to, groceries to pick up, tasks at work. E-mail users inevitably rely on their inbox as an implicit to-do list. If that to-do list is cluttered with tasks, then fewer of them will get done, important deadlines will be overshot, FOMO will become justified, and the list will end up even more cluttered than before.
If a clean to-do list allows a person to get more done by decreasing cognitive burden, and if an inbox is just another kind of to-do list, then it should have as few messages in it as possible. That is far from the reality for most e-mail users, whose inboxes are chaotic nightmares. Rather than blaming the users (which only bad designers do), we need to look at the real cause: a lack of tools for managing that chaos. Google Inbox provided new and (obvious yet) revolutionary tools for getting your e-mail under control. These tools included:
- Snooze: You could make a message disappear for a specified amount of time to reappear when you had time to address it.
- Hover controls: Instead of having to open a message to perform actions on it (like deletion or filing), you could do it all from the main inbox view.
- Nudges: If you did not reply to an e-mail in your inbox, Google would push it to the top to remind you to attend to it.
- Live information: If you received e-mails relating to flights or package deliveries, Google could retrieve updates on these matters from the internet and display them in Inbox.
The first two features made it easy to take a machete to the jungle of your inbox and clear away the noise, while the nudges made the remaining foliage a little more hospitable. The live information hinted at a future where the multitude of notifications bombarding you from all corners of the web could be centralized in your e-mail, that redoubtable digital Swiss Army knife. In addition to these whiz-bang features, the addition of old-fashioned white space made e-mail feel far less claustrophobic. All of these improvements were made with an eye toward lowering the user’s cognitive burden, allowing e-mail to take up less space in their brain.
However, while those those features took the spotlight, a very low-tech, subtle innovation may have been the most important of all, or at least should have. Traditionally, messages in your inbox have two ultimate fates: they are either deleted, or they are archived. Deletion is an easy-to-understand concept, but it is also destructive and permanent. The alternative is archiving, which allows users to remove the message from the inbox, but leave it available for future reference if needed. The problem with archiving is that a lot of people don’t really understand it. It sounds musty and bureaucratic. Inbox did something brilliant: it simply renamed archiving into “Done”.
Instead of sending valued but concluded message threads to a mysterious “archive”, users could now mark them as “done”. If e-mail is a to-do list, then the archive is a to-did list. The dopamine hit from marking a message as done dwarfs the joyless abstraction of archiving it. This simple semantic change was the most important of all those in Google Inbox because it made the other, flashier features more useful. If those features were intended to make it easier for the user to ultimately mark a message as “done”, how much of their potency will they lose when they now are leading to merely “archive”.
“Done”, that wonderful, liberating concept, was what made Inbox so necessary. At the opening of the decade, every form of information that a person might consume across the internet — concert or travel tickets, package deliveries, social media, bank statements, and more — was landing in their inbox, causing them to once again become as overgrown as they had been a decade prior.
Spam filters were not going to solve this problem. It was no longer a matter of separating the crap from the cream, but separating the cream from the creamier cream. At a certain point, we had so much relevant information coming our way and demanding our attention that the old-school tools wouldn’t cut it. All of the automatic sorting, live updates, and reminders could only delay the inevitable: eventually you, the human, were going to have to go in and decide what to do about each communication you received. “Done” was the cognitive tool that gave you the impetus to take on that barrage of information.
The other tools led you to water, but “done” is what made you drink.
Where it all went wrong
When Inbox launched, e-mail remained the central hub of your digital communications — you may recall a time when sites like LinkedIn and Facebook e-mailed you the entire contents of messages sent to you via their internal messengers — but it was in a precarious spot. A victim of its own success, e-mail was overloaded with information. If the utility of an information channel is limited by its noise, then e-mail was becoming more useless every day as inboxes became ever noisier.
If e-mail were to fail as a channel, this would mean the loss of that centralized communications hub. It isn’t simply the fact that there is more information than ever, but that it comes from so many different sources. E-mail is the neutral ground at which all those different sources gather, without which you would need to visit each website separately to get your news, your airline tickets, your order status, your social media updates. The loss of e-mail would mean the balkanization of information… but for the fact that nature abhors a vacuum.
In the absence of e-mail, there are no shortage of contenders for the next central hub of your digital communications. Unfortunately, none of them are a good alternative. Your mobile phone is built to receive updates from apps rather than sites. The problem there is that creating an app through which you can offer updates has a higher barrier to entry than simply setting up a mailing list, and you need to maintain an app for each of the two major operating systems, not to mention the fact that this perpetuates the pernicious ongoing mobile duopoly. Another emerging option is even more dystopian: entirely self-contained app ecosystems that replace everything... and control everything. Amazon and Facebook are attempting to do just that, but China’s WeChat is even further along.
Compared to these paternalistic corporate alternatives, old, uncool, neutral ground e-mail clearly remains the best option. The crisis of e-mail in the 2010s was an opportunity for e-mail to reassert its dominance as your primary means of information centralization. In order to do this, e-mail would have to cut the noise out of its channel. Inbox, with its tools for information management, especially its concept of “done”, should have led the charge. But something went wrong.
Perhaps Google didn’t realize how much was riding on Inbox, given that it was the only platform with the potential to protect e-mail from the predators looking to usurp its position. For all of its innovative features, Inbox was constantly half-assed. Consider this (incomplete) list of usability problems that were never corrected:
- If you copied an e-mail address with a typo, you couldn’t edit it.
- Deleting a message in your trash actually un-deleted the message.
- Your typing cursor in the compose window behaved poorly.
- You could not sort the trash by date deleted rather than date received.
- When you wanted to save a new reminder, the command was titled “done” confusing it with the actual “done” (archive) function.
- There was no click-and-drag like Gmail has.
- You couldn’t delete an individual message in a thread.
- You could only load a certain number of messages. To see anything earlier, you’d have to delete some of the messages you could see, or just go into Gmail.
Despite these glaring faults, Google blithely attempted to push the unfinished product on users. It may be hard to believe now, but at one point they even looked like they were going to kill Gmail in favor of Inbox, as they were trying to default my accounts to Inbox. If I directed my browser to Gmail, it would redirect to Inbox, and I had to manually turn this redirect off. By pushing this broken crap on their user base, they may well have engendered ill will, but certainly not any enthusiasm for their cause.
That enthusiasm might have come in handy. Megacorporations looking to overthrow e-mail were not patiently waiting for it to die, but actively finding ways to undermine it. At some point, the social media platforms stopped sending you the content of internal notifications via e-mail, forcing you to log in to their site, or install their app. A public more passionate about preserving their e-mail might have generated more of an uproar over these anti-user measures, but no such uproar ever occurred. Social media has all but decoupled itself from e-mail.
Moreover, had Google managed to build more than a cult following for Inbox, they may have been able to devote to it the resources necessary to make it fully competitive against the walled gardens and mega-apps. Perhaps they could have even evolved Inbox toward a form of decentralized social network, had they not been so preoccupied with the slow-motion train wreck that was Plus.
In any case, Inbox was unceremoniously shuttered after five years without having accomplished the revolution of e-mail for the 2010s. With only some of Inbox’s features folded into Gmail, we are left with merely a highly optimized version of 2000s e-mail. That’s not enough to protect e-mail from encroaching mega-apps. The return to Gmail almost feels like a quiet admission of defeat from Google, not of Inbox, but of the entire concept of e-mail. It’s swimming back upstream to die.
Saving the internet
So is it too late to save e-mail? We are about to enter the 2020s with an e-mail that never quite made it into the 2010s. Even the e-mail revolution of the 2000s never quite propagated all the way; consider Microsoft Outlook’s questionable implementation of message threading. E-mail is still salvageable, but it needs a quantum leap into the future, something as ambitious as Google (now Apache) Wave. Failure to do so means ceding our communications to walled prisons.
But before we even worry about a launching a revolution, we need to remind the world that e-mail is, in fact, worth saving. People’s inboxes are more cluttered than ever and the whole medium is regarded as a dreaded chore. We need to clear the channel of noise to reveal its signal. To do this, we should bring back that neglected linchpin of a failed revolution, the “Done” feature. It is not too late to add “Done” to Gmail and get people hacking away at the jungle of their inbox.
Even if e-mail were doomed, the potential of “Done” goes far beyond a single communications channel. Even Google seems to have missed the potential of this idea, or they would have fought harder for it. “Done” is a powerful notion in a world where nothing is ever done. We live in the world of the crap feed.
Ever since Facebook announced the Newsfeed in 2006, the internet has seen the proliferation of this dangerous concept. While people in 2006 considered this to be an invasion of privacy (laughably, given what Facebook was really up to), they didn’t realize the actual danger of news feeds. News feeds, or crap feeds if we’re being honest, combine two innovations into a single neurotoxic abomination.
One of those innovations is personalization. Using sketchy algorithms that nobody really understands, news feeds push content on users that they are deemed statistically likely to click on. It doesn’t mean that the content is useful or beneficial to the user, simply that they will feel compelled to consume it. If they do not consume it, they will be left with a nagging feeling that they are missing some important knowledge or experience. Simply discovering the existence of this recommended content may be enough to plant the seed of doubt and FOMO in the consumer.
Compounding the problem of personalization is the other innovation: endlessness. Technically, there will only ever be a finite amount of information in the world, however that amount is so unfathomably vast that a person could not consume even the information specifically recommended to them by algorithms in ten lifetimes of sitting in front of a computer doing nothing else. The question is, why would you want to spend your life doing that?
Put these two innovations together and the results speak for themselves. Endless content without personalization is background noise, static, easily tuned out. Personalization in (visibly) finite quantities provides greater utility to the consumer. But when you have an endless stream of stuff, all of which seems to call you by name, you have the beginnings of madness.
As a user scrolls through a crap feed, they encounter all sorts of personalized content that feels like a fortuitous coincidence. They may consume it immediately, or bookmark it, or open a new tab to look at later. The effect is the same, our subject accumulates an ever-growing, never-shrinking pile of stuff they are convinced they have to see or hear (most of which will be disappointing). They will feel as though they are falling further and further behind, their task ever more insurmountable. The overwhelming pile of infocrap will fester in the user’s mind, inhibiting their ability to prioritize, and this includes not only digital content, but the actual tasks in their daily life; you know, the stuff that matters. Madness.
If this story sounds familiar, it should. The problem of the crap feed is the problem of your e-mail inbox. Spam filters solved the problem of genuinely unwanted, useless garbage in your inbox, but it could do nothing about the stuff you (said you) wanted. The news from around the internet, the marketing e-mails from the brands you buy, the social updates, they are all convening on your inbox, creating a form of crap feed.
The thing that separates e-mail from social crap feeds is that there is an end somewhere buried in that pile of clearance sales from Lululemon. Google Inbox was conceived with the aim of reaching that goal, a mythical Elysium where there are no messages in your inbox known as “inbox zero”. The concept of “Done” is a tool to cognitively reward a user for taking steps toward inbox zero. “Done” would not have much of a point if your inbox were endless. “Done” reminds you that there is a finish line, and it is well known that visualizing the finish line helps you get there.
So how can “Done” help save the internet from crap feeds if crap feeds are endless? You can never be done surfing through the feed. There will always be another corgi video, another politically incorrect meme, another “must read” article on productivity waiting for you a few more scrolls away. Well, it’s not the tool that will save the internet. It’s the mentality that brought you the tool. “Done” doesn’t do anything that “archive” didn’t. It just changes your mindset. That mindset is what could save us all from madness.
The pertinent question is, why would Facebook, the inventor of the crap feed and chief purveyor of cyber addiction, adopt a mindset of “Done”? The answer is they probably won’t. It’s up to everyone else who is looking to compete with, or alongside Facebook to do it for them. As for who the first among “everyone else” should be, perhaps the answer won’t surprise you: good old-fashioned e-mail.
E-mail is the only centralized, platform-agnostic hub of information that could possibly have your interests at heart. It is the only channel with a reason to adopt the “Done” mentality, since any channel that treats you as a product wants to keep you wired in and serve you as many ads as possible. Those other channels know this and have endeavored to make themselves independent of e-mail. Whatever the e-mail revolution of the 2020s is, it needs to find a way to overcome this hurdle.
If we can bring about this 2020s e-mail revolution, we can collectively impose “Done” upon the tech giants. They can either put an end to endlessness or they will be circumvented and made obsolete. Social, news, and any other media would have to focus on giving you only the legitimate best content and leaving it at that. Once you checked off your daily dose of digital information, you could go out into the real world and make use of that information.
On the other hand, the failure of this revolution means that the prospects for a platform-agnostic, open-source, user-centric hub of information will be grim. People will be pulled into the orbits of corporate ecosystems and their lifestyles will be subject to the whims and vagaries of yupster manchildren… or WeChat. If you have any doubt as to what is at stake, just look up Facebook’s “other inbox”.
If we don’t bring about a “Done” revolution, then the internet itself is done.
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