The Gmail service was recently updated to a ‘tabbed style’. Though the change was announced on May 29 in Google’s official blog, the change went into effect for many users only recently. The idea behind the new design is very simple. As they point it out on the blog:
We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more. All of these emails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done
I think it is quite innovative. With the new inbox, you definitely have to spend less time in reading all your important mail, as the updates and advertisements are out of your way now. And whenever you have some spare time, you can always go to the promotions tab and read those advertisements. The tabbed design is a pan device update. This means that you can access the new Gmail inbox on your desktop as well as in your mobile device.
A Better User Experience
The new Gmail Inbox is aimed at providing the user with a better and more streamlined experience. With the new design, all the important mails get more attention and the promotional mails stay in one place for you to read in your free time. You are still in total control of how your Inbox looks. It is you who choose which tabs out of the five you want or if you do not want the tabbed design at all. You can also move mails between different tabs and make Gmail learn about your preferences for future. For the end user, it is definitely an update for the good.
A Better Way for Gmail to Earn
Google is no doubt extremely well at everything they do. Being an advertisement driven model, they update their features with revenue in mind. Google has found a way to earn some extra revenue from this tabbed design too. Often, you can see an ad from Google in the form of an email in the ‘promotions’ tab. What is more interesting that there is no check mark with this ‘mail’. So apparently, you just cannot delete it without reading.
In my opinion, the new Gmail inbox is a very good update for us. In the past few days, I have been experiencing the tabbed design and found that it really helps in reducing the time I previously wasted in finding the important mail in between the advertisement. The mail count that shows the number of ‘unread’ mails now includes only those mails which are in the primary tab. All the mails in the ‘social’, ‘updates’, ‘promotions’, or ‘promotions’ tabs are not included in this count. This is very convenient as the unread count always makes me check my email, thus wasting my time if it is an advertisement.
Though good for the end user, the new tabbed design may mean increased problems for the marketing managers. Have you switched to the new inbox? Share your views with us in the comments!