Gmail
Gmail has been used worldwide by many users and continuing to grow. Let's find out how we improve Gmail with new ideas.
Idea ‐ Improvement to Gmail
Gmail has always been an emailing platform for users to send messages from one to another. What if Gmail can use some of the features that Slack provides such as direct message to people within an organization or features from Confluence for creating and/or adding task to your employees and/or colleagues?
My Goals to accomplish for this project
1. Adding the popular feature from Slack such as the direct message or message to your groups or selected colleague together.
2. Without making too many changes to the current Gmail look and feel as a lot of people already got used to the current experience.
3. Adding one of the features from Confluence such as the add/create task to your team members.
4. The ability to preview all the same file type in one go and combined all the same file type together.
How I approach to this innovation idea for Gmail?
You may ask how I got started this innovation idea for Gmail. As an UX Designer, I have been working with a lot of businesses and users’ problems and coming up with different solutions for them. I always look for solutions for everything in my life, no matter what products or services that may be for improvement. Slack and Confluence are two products/services that I used often at work and Gmail is also a product/service that I used a lot for personally. So, I sat down and think how I can combine all the products/services that I used daily into one giant product/service where I can just go to one place for everything. Then this idea of combining everything onto Gmail came to me so I picked the most commonly used features that I would like to implement from Slack and Confluence into Gmail which is the chat feature from Slack and adding tasks to your team members from Confluence.
The design phase
My first step was to recreate all the Gmail elements from scratch before I can start planning anything.
Before I start implementing any ideas onto Gmail, I had to select the colour palette and font-family. I am keeping the current Google colours and using the font-family of Roboto.
I decided to add the chat system onto the left similar to what we have now on Slack, this way a lot of the users are already familiar with the functionality and placement where they should go. Next thing I looked at the tab in the middle where there are “Primary”, “Socials” and “Promotions”. I would like to use the space that we have available to be able to view the content more in the middle for chat and also creating and adding tasks for team members.
Final Design
As you can see, I am able to use the space that we have available within Gmail and integrate with Slack and Confluence functionality. I am quite happy with the final design and hope to find more new projects where I can help to improve the products/services.