Sorry people, in the last few weeks I didn't have any spare time to dedicate to my blog. Today I found a few seconds for it :) and I wanted to present something that annoys me for a long time... Gmail.
I use Gmail email services most of the time, and I use it plenty. BUT there are a few things that really bother me, annoying as hell...
Navigating or NOvigating between emails
Reading an email in Gmail is always in a news screen and not in the inbox view. In order to view another message in my inbox I need to go back to Inbox and click on another message to view, or go to the next email from within a message,(Next or Previous one).
The problem is that for people who work with their email, they just don't read one email after the other. They scan the inbox and select which messages are relevant now. So Gmail left me with two horrible options:
- From the inbox to a message and back to the inbox to select another one
- From the inbox to a message and from the message to another one while marking each message I dont want to handle at the moment again as unread.
This is too much fuss...
Sorting or Searting
Gmail has a lot of shortcuts, much more than you can remember, I even took on myself a few weeks ago to gather most of the, you can read about them here. But these shortcuts the fertilize the user of the search box is time consuming and annoying. Of course Google have a very sofisticated search engine, so why not use it... but we users prefer to do the simple tasks in one click. One click to sort according to sender name, one click to sort according to attachments and etc...
By the way - when I wrote searting on this paragraph title it represents Sorting+Searching in one word.
Filtering?
Beside using all the wonderful search option inside Gmail, you can also select to flag specific messages according to their status All, None, Read, Unread, Starred, and Unstarred messages. This action checks the relevant message checkbox. But... I starred a message for a reason... How do i track all my starred messages? in order to view all my starred messages I need to visually scan all my inbox screens (currently I have more then 1000 pages) and to locate in each on the highlighted one. Sadly I can't use this quick "star" function as my "follow up" tool.
There are a lot of other small things that bother me, and a lot more things that I really enjoy in Gmail (Like the super smart "Undo" function), and I understand that to every problem I presented there are ways to overcome. But in terms of usability it lacks.
What about the competition
Last, I wanted to mention two competitive Email services Microsoft's windows live - Hotmail, and Yahoo mail. To say that both are pretty similar and due to that both offer a smart and simple outlook-like solutions for sorting, filtering, message previews and easy navigation between emails. They have their own usability problems, but as work tools they have the advantage.
So what do you use, and how will you make it better?