Take the Task Offline

Elizabeth Laraki writing about designing Gmail in its earliest days:

Kevin refined his explorations to prioritize the newest unread message while also providing context from the other messages in the conversation. But nothing felt quite right. So he took the task offline. He grabbed a pile of index cards and tried grouping, ordering, and stacking them in different ways. Doing this gave Kevin the idea to treat each email as a card and to stack the messages in a pile. He ordered the stack oldest to newest, so the most recent message was on top. He then pulled out each card to reveal peeks of earlier messages, providing context of the whole conversation at-a-glance.

I love this story. As designers we should not only be creative when designing complex interactions, but we should also experiment with creative design methods. Elizabeth’s example is perfect. Get away from the mouse and keyboard. Stop dragging rectangles around. Try to approach problems in more tangible, unexpected ways.

This reminds me of a story from Creative Selection, a book written by Ken Koceinda who designed and built the iPhone’s initial keyboard. During a meeting to discuss the iPhone’s software, Imran Chaudhri, a designer who worked on many Apple products in addition to co-founding Humane, placed a piece of paper on a table. He pressed a finger down on the paper and moved it around. He pointed out how humans expect the paper’s movement to be perfectly smooth, and it was crucial for the iPhone to feel as responsive as physically moving the paper. If moving an element on a touchscreen had any delays or jumps, the illusion of physicality would break and the product would feel subpar.

I’m setting a goal right now to incorporate paper in an upcoming design project.

Design Gmail iPhone