From a business perspective I understand that there are more people using Gmail than Calendar, Keep or the new Tasks, but the way Google has attempted to bring people into the fold and have them use add-ons and the rest of their products is just crazy. It’s a designer’s nightmare and it transports me back to the 90s when only developers were building web apps. Why do I mention the 90s? Well, it’s because it happens to look very similar to Outlook, AOL, and Yahoo, all from this era. All of these services still work amazingly well, but it’s not accurate to call what Google has done new. It’s the same thing in a new box, with the same problems and over complexity. It comes as no surprise that companies like Slack succeed by solving these problems.

Starting to look a lot like this — which gets even worse on mobile

“Google has 4 million people paying for G Suite right now, compared to 120 million Office 365 commercial users….1.4 billion people are using Gmail, compared to 400 million on Microsoft’s Outlook.com service.” (The Verge)

There is more functionality and design here than on an airplane dashboard.

Innovation

Cross-selling, merging, and doing a Frankenstein is not innovation. Moving features from one service to another is also not innovation. Even though it’s impossible to innovate every year, I would hope that within one of the core products at Google there is a willingness to innovate. When I hear of a redesign I’m always excited, and I’m still excited about the fact that something has changed with Gmail, even if it’s not enough to get me to go back to using it.

Here are a few of the innovations that are needed:

A good method for telling users what’s important to read and what can wait for later.

• A way to help users handle the amount of emails they get.

• An efficient way to categorize, filter and search content.

• New ways of passing information (from media types, to supported files for preview).

• A tool to help users fix mistakes they’ve made, such as sending someone the wrong email, or spelling something incorrectly.

• Providing an efficient way of sending big files (Drive works to some extent, but it’s cumbersome in many cases).

• Allowing users to handle their business better through Gmail (e.g. sign documents, approve things, review things).

• Allowing users to design their emails in a better way.

• Letting users know if someone read their presentation and what parts interested them (DocSend).

All of these are focused on the core usage of Gmail: communicating with information. Ideally, you don’t need emails to schedule a meeting because emailing is slow, complicated and sometimes requires too much coordination. That’s why you have tools like X.AI (Amy), Calendarly and Doodle. Tasks are also way better informed by chatter rather than an email.