I know that some people have been critical of the UX design coming out of Google:
“You might imagine such a robotic approach to design would be frustrating for anyone with a design background. And you’d be right …”
I’ve tended to nod silently, but this time the Google wizards seem to have really done something stupid. I was extremely happy this morning when I read that “Priority Inbox” functionality was coming to the Gmail Android App. I should have read more carefully, the post actually says:
“… limited support for Priority Inbox. If you’ve enabled Priority Inbox via the desktop version of Gmail, you’ll see an “Important” label that shows all messages flagged as important.”
This matters because of the way that Priority Inbox works. According to another post touting the feature in the desktop browser-based implementation:
“If Gmail makes a mistake, you can help it learn to better categorize your messages. Select the misclassified message, then use the importance buttons at the top of your inbox to correctly mark it as important or not important.”
Therein lies the problem:
I want Gmail to know what messages I think are important so that it will include them in the “Important and unread” section of my priority mailbox. I’ve been dutifully marking / unmarking messages as directed above. Unfortunately, this training directly conflicts with the new overloaded functionality of the Important label in the Gmail Android app.
Everything that I’ve ever marked as “Important” shows up in the Gmail Android app when I look at the “Important” label. Even messages that I’ve dealt with, and archived weeks ago. Here’s the gotcha: To make the Android implementation usable, I have to mark the processed messages as “not important.” THIS WILL MESS UP GMAIL’S TRAINING TO RECOGNIZE IMPORTANT MESSAGES!
The UX design geniuses at Google have left me with a Cornelian dilemma (yeah, I had to go look that one up, but it sounds better than “lose-lose situation”, right?). I either tolerate a worthless experience with the Gmail Android App, or I screw my training for the browser-based Gmail.
Who thought that overloading the “Important” label functionality this way made any sense at all? How much harder would it have been to tweak the Gmail Android app just a bit more so that we could filter for both Important and Unread, just like they already do in the browser? I can’t figure out if the Gmail app team is careless, or just lazy, but the current implementation is simply ridiculous, not to mention utterly useless.
Stuff like this, and the equally worthless “Tasks” implementation on Android really force me to wonder whether Google ever asks for feedback from anyone who actually uses this stuff in the real world.
