All projects: Gel, Good Todo, Games, Uncle Mark, Bit Literacy
User interface design lesson, via Gmail
I like using Gmail because of its spam filter and the deliverability of messages I send from the account. And, superficially at least, it's free. But Gmail's usability has always been somewhat disappointing - I've written about it here (on lack of sorting) and here (about Priority Inbox).
Recently I discovered another aspect of Gmail that provides a good case study in tactical interface design.
Below is the button bar visible when you view an individual email message. Note the second button, "Report spam", which tells Gmail to remove the message from the inbox:
Now take a look at the buttons below. These show up when you're viewing messages already marked as Spam. Note that the second button here is called "Not spam", which tells Gmail to insert the message into the inbox:
The number one rule of software interface design is consistency: the same element, or similar elements, should always work the same way throughout the application. A consistent interface reduces the cognitive load on the user - or put another way, it allows users to fly through the app without having to think too much.
Gmail's interface, in this instance, breaks the rule of consistency. Did you notice how? When viewing a message (in the first graphic above), the button mentioning "spam" marks messages as spam and makes them go away. But the next moment, when the user clicks to the Spam page, the button mentioning "spam" - placed in the same location, second place on the bar, does the exact opposite: it exposes the message by putting it back in the inbox.
I've witnessed the problem this causes: the user, accustomed to clicking the "spam" button to get rid of messages, goes into the Spam page, reviews the contents, confirms that these are indeed unwanted messages, and clicks the "spam" button on the button bar. And voilà: all the spam mails are dumped into his inbox.
One easy improvement would be to rename the "Not spam" button to "Move to inbox". Other aspects like font, color, style, and screen location might also drive some incremental improvement. (A good exercise for the metrics-driven UI designers on the Gmail team!)
Meantime, I'll keep forwarding my action items to Good Todo, since that's the main thing that keeps my inbox clean.
P.S. I'm not the only one with issues with Gmail. Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote this column about Gmail's usability a few months back, asking, "did anyone with training in interface design even look at Gmail before it launched?" There's also a followup column. Both worth reading.
I understand the criticism, but I'm not sure what you expect the button to do. Why would there be a button in the Spam interface to put mail in the Spam folder that is already in the Spam folder? There is definitely a use for a button to transfer mail back to the main inbox, and the convention for that button seems to be "button that moves stuff to where it is not". If not in that location, where would you place the button to mark a mail as not spam?
@Mitya - as I said, I think the primary improvement would be renaming it "Move to inbox".
I'm not sure its as inconsistent as you discussed. Looking at effects rather than labels:
The bold button on the left says, "Remove this from the current list using the normal filing process. I probably don't want to deal with this again."
The next button says, "This email was miscategorized by the spam filter. Please correct this."
I don't see that as an inconsistency but a state of the button. Mac Mail does the same thing (as does Entourage I think). When viewing messages the "Junk" button (Mark as Junk/move to trash folder) is labeled "Junk". When I'm viewing messages and sometimes group e-mails are mislabeled "Junk" the button becomes "Not Junk" - the idea of where the message goes as in "Move To Inbox" is entirely secondary. Where the message goes is just a symptom of whether it's junk or not. Labeling it "Move to Inbox" would be a much worse indiscretion as there is a "Move to…" button to the immediate right.
I'm inclined to agree with Mark, since the action moves the message to the inbox even in cases when the message wasn't there when the user flagged it as spam.
Another approach is to have the "Delete forever" stand alone and move the "Not Spam/Move to inbox" function/button to the left side of "Move to"
Sometimes the context is so special that conventions have to be broken. The spam folder may be such a case.
@Mark - Well, wouldn't renaming "Report spam" to "Move to spam" go along with your suggestion to rename the "Not spam" button? That way they're consistent ;). Then again, what about the extra information gleaned from the term "Report"? Is the user aware that information is being collected and acted on in the future if it didn't contain that in the label?
I believe the location for these buttons work because I understand the context in which they exist. Maybe I did take an extra second to think about what "Not spam" would do but once that was figued out I never thought about it again - until today. I suppose that extra second for initial understanding is what you're after and I do agree that it could be better, but certainly not a showstopper.
@Jim - The position and wording of the two buttons are very similar, yet they take opposite actions - despite both having the word "spam" in the button title. So people who are used to clicking the "spam" button in the inbox day-to-day are likely to make a mistake in the spam view and click *that* "spam" button mistakenly, putting the spam mails in their inbox. Thus it's not a "learn once, use forever" model - instead, it's a "learn once, then remind yourself every time you go into spam so as not to make a mistake" model. That's the problem.
I actually see the buttons doing the EXACT same thing. Because both buttons are REMOVING the email from the area you are viewing them. I've never had any issues with this or anything else with Gmail. I have a much easier time navigating and accomplishing tasks in gmail than I have with any other competing email service.
All Google products are based on really great ideas and I'm fan but all have interface issues. Is there a ergonomist in the Google team? If not I'm candidate... ;-)
Sure the button consistently moves the message out of the area you're in, but that means you have to remember what area you're in. Which is easy to forget when you're in the flow of reading the actual emails.
I d'not agree with you. When a user is in the ”spam section”, he's not following the same rules as in the ”inbox section”. People generally are not interested in spam folder. Most of them don't even check it very often, and even if they check it, they only want to delete it, so the bold button(delete) does it's job. For the ones that regularly check the spam folder the rules change. I think they are aware of the navigational tab they're in so they are aware of the location they're at. Is much easier to move a ”not spam-y” mail into inbox. I never had problems that address this issue.
I appreciate what you mean here but definatly disagree with you.
For one thing any user reading spam would have had to deliberately go out of their way to do so, they would know it was spam and are highly unlikley to wish to tag it aas such again.
Secondly the button IS consistent, it is a toggle for marking as spam or not. The vast majority of buttons that people see in real life operate as a toggle, be it on/off, open/close, in/out (ignoring keyboards here because people dont see them as buttons anymore). Most people would expect to see either the option change state (as it does) to allow the reverse or for both to be shown with one disabled (silly waste of space).
Ironically you missed the inconsistency that is there, the delete button being to the left of spam in one but the right of spam in the other. Failure to see teh wood for teh trees here me thinks.