Email and the problem with Gmail

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

After years of using a standard email format, last year I decided to switch to Gmail. Everyone else seemed to be using it and loving it. Six months on, I still hate it.

Why do I hate it? All my email threads are backwards – I want to read the most recent at the top, not everything before that. Click reply, and it keeps the thread of emails at the top while also duplicating the thread at the bottom (the right way round now) with my reply floating in the middle somewhere. I still have to think about where I should be typing. It makes me nervous.

They insist on referring to my emails as ‘conversations’. Fair enough if I’ve deleted a thread of emails. But most of the time, I’m deleting a single marketing email – yet I’m told I’m ‘deleting a conversation’. Every time I think ‘Uh oh, what did I just delete? Oh hang on, it was just that single email. Not a ‘conversation.’ And everytime, I hate Gmail a little more. Reassuringly, I’m not the only one frustrated by this.

If I had always used Gmail, would I still have these problems? Probably not, but I don’t feel that Gmail offers a better experience, just a different one that I’m struggling to adopt. I can open Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook – I instantly understand how to use them all because they follow longstanding email conventions that make sense to me. 

If Google were to offer a ‘normal email’ view I’d be happy. They aren’t designing their products with existing consumer behaviour in mind. Rather they are intent on creating new behaviours, unique to their products. In doing this, they create enthusiastic users and brand advocates – but they also alienate many consumers, most of whom want something simple, easy and familiar.

In their words ‘Google Mail is built on the idea that email can be more intuitive, efficient and useful. And maybe even fun.’  Maybe it is more efficient but it’s not more useful, it certainly isn’t intuitive to me and it definitely is not fun.

~Jen