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Gmail and content findability

Fred Oliveira on August 1, 2006

Google Mail (or Gmail) is a great service. Enough storage to keep a hefty amount of email, and what you might call a cleverly developed fast user interface. But it has its shortcomings - shortcomings that annoy the hell out of me as a user, and that no one seems to care enough about to implement.

Content findability

Email re-findability:

Storage is granted, so people tend to archive email (or just keep it for a very long time) in services like Gmail. This constitutes a problem when it comes to re-findability. Here’s a practical example:

I subscribe to the Ruby on Rails mailing list, which is pretty high traffic. Due to time constraints, I don’t read all the list’s emails - I archive them for reference. However, when I do search for something and find an email I know I’m going to be interested in the future, I can only “Star” it. That’s a start, but there’s no way for me to organize it in a way that conveys contextual meaning to me (in the middle of 20.000 other email messages).

So I’d like to be able to tag that email with keywords that mean something to me (e.g: rails, caching, bug) so that I can traverse a tree of tags and find that particular email fast if I need it. The usual search model for finding content just doesn’t cut it in this sort of situation.

The need for better solutions

Email solutions (like Gmail) aren’t the only products with content findability issues, but developers haven’t really woken up to that problem - even though they will have to sooner or later. We’re being overrun by increasing levels of information each day (in our email, in our RSS feeds, in our news), and haven’t found ways to properly deal with that.

There’s a larger version of the illustration in this story on our Flickr page.


Comments on this post

Luigi

But you *can* tag in Gmail. They’re called labels, but its the same idea. One message can have many labels.

Fred

Luigi, I naturally know about labels, and (ab)use them. However, labels don’t allow anyone to go all in and “label” something “rails” + “blog” + “scaling” and combine that in a meaningful way. Plus, if you want to use labels to the same depth you use tags in a system like del.icio.us, you’ll end up with dozens (if not hundreds) of them, and Gmail’s user interface doesn’t allow quick label creation.

All this to say that Gmail’s label system is “okay” but is more similar to folders in a regular email app like Thunderbird or Outlook than to folksonomies. I’m talking about something truly different here.

Tristan Dunn

Yes, Luigi, labels exists, but you can only create one at a time, which is slow. Why can’t we enter comma or space seperated names to create multiple at once? Not to mention the label box becomes useless once you actually start using them as tags, forcing you to use search. I shouldn’t have to type every single time I want to find something, in my opinion.

Jere Majava

I’d really love to see tags in GMail. But if GMail had proper tagging funcionality and interface, would that solve the findability problem? What about finding old emails from a certain time? I’ve been using Gmail only for few months, so I don’t real have a need for that yet, but I expect this might become an essential feature after a year or two.

Antonio Pratas

I too use gmail, for two years now, and I also find gmail search a little limited, and as Tristan says, I don´t like to type every single time I want to find something. I also use labels to associate each group of e-mails to the sender, but that doesn’t help at all when trying to find a specific e-mail with a specific content or at a specific date.

I hope that the gmail team is working on improvements like tagging and better searching, and I believe this because only recently they added basic features as Delete All Spam and Empty Trash, and these two features are basic enough to make me wonder why in the world they didn’t implemented in the first place. I have a theory tough: by the time that gmail launched, it was an mail account for the rest of our lives, they said that with 2GB we wouldn’t need to delete any email for the rest of our lives. That is obviously false as “You are currently using 788 MB (29%) of your 2750 MB.” shows, and I intend on living at least more 10 years, that must be enough to fill it. So, did gmail team didn’t added those features because they were afraid that if they did, users wouldn’t believe in their “mail for life” story?

Jason

I guess I’m on the opposing end here, but I hope they don’t add tagging and all the other features discussed. I can find things relatively easy even using 40% of my disk space. (Looking for something in prototype.js? Click on my rails-spinoff label and search for bindAsEvenListener, or whatever I happen to be searching for). I just see those other things cluttering up the interface and confusing users. I would be all for behind the scenes changes that make the search better, however.

Fred

Jason: that’s an extremely valid point. My only problem with it (and the way you use your account seems to be pretty similar to mine) is relevancy. When you are searching, do you always find the most relevant post for what you’re looking for? From my experience, I sometimes don’t get to the exact threads I’m looking for due to the size of my mailbox.

I am all for simple systems (lean and mean), but I’m also for utility, and thats where I believe new findability systems would help.

Jeremy

I agree with Fred. I do think that Gmail labels are useful, but they could use a little help. How about adding a feature similar to tag groups on del.icio.us? I know my list of labels on Gmail is getting ridiculously long and I would love to be able to group like labels together.

KevinH

Check out Zimbra. We’ve got search, saved searches, tags and folders. Use what you need/want ignore the rest. We spent alot of time with user’s and realized there is no one-size fits all. Some people won’t use any, some will use only folders, and other will use all of them. You can see a live demo here:

http://www.zimbra.com/demo

Eddie

Self plug-
I’ve discussed email findability and tagging here:
http://my.opera.com/usability/blog/show.dml/237595

Zoli Erdos

The other problem is search itself: it points to a thread, rather then individual emails. This may be OK with a casual conversation, but discussion groups tend to have 30-50-100 items all under the same title, threaded together, in which case the search results are quite helpless.

Mario

I really wonder if people using gmail to store hundreds, no thousands of email, if so i can imagine you need a good set of mind to remember where did go what, not much different right now in gmail as indeed any other piece of software using folders. But do peopel store that much on info at gmail? Is it not more likely gmail is either used in combination with outlook or just as a home hobby based online email client? I can’t imagine myself to store thousands of corporate emails on the gmail severs?!? So asking myself again, if your not really organised from nature where you put what where yes you would need a damn good search option within your mail client. However for a couple of hundreds of mail and being organised i find my way quite fast trough. Sorry I never had that feeling to use gmail, yahoo, msn or any other online email client as usueful for business mail. It stays in my mind a kind of home improvement thing, for the mums and dads, the kids and other families and friends kind of mail storage and send facility. Security could maybe be another factor. Anyway I wonder how many people really do store thousands of email on their gmail account?

Something to say?