Email in 2020

Photo by pineapple L on Unsplash

It’s 2020, and we’re somehow lucky to have this multitude of communication tools that help us communicate and collaborate. The most common communication factor across almost all businesses in all industries is email. Basically, everybody is using email.

Yet, I see that email is still having fundamental issues in the user experience that could be fixed, and a lot of people would be happy. Below is a tiny wish list of stuff that I would like to see in emails/email clients.

Reaction buttons

That’s how slack is doing it now.

I would love to have a “👍” button, check mark, smiling faces, as part of reaction buttons to emails. Some emails don’t need me to reply and compose a message expressing my feeling towards what I received. Sometimes I am just CC’d in the email, and I would like to let the sender know that I saw the email and I’m informed. So, I think a reaction button in the style we have on slack could be useful, delightful, and time-saving.

Better threads

Everytime I get looped late in an email thread I get disgusted by how hard it feels like to consume the thread. Like really, I have to dig, and check who, when, and what, for every single reply in that thread before I was looped. It’s cumbersome, ugly, and time-consuming.

If I write a user story for it, it would be:

As a user who gets looped later in an email conversation, I want to achieve clear and quick separation between the different messages in the thread, which allows me to know who replied to whom, and when, so that I can easily understand the thread and contribute/decide effectively.

I just hope not to feel like this. Source

I’m not a UX/UI designer, but I can try some ideas 😄.. maybe in a later post.. or I will update this section. I see that colors, frames, and typography can be used easily to achieve this goal.

Better quoting capabilities.

It’s not very easy to reply quoting some text from the email you got. Probably having anchor links to snippets that I am trying to refer to, or threaded replies with proper quoting and proper indentation can fix such issues.

More assistant-like features

Source: Giphy

• It would be great to have an accurate executive summary giving me the summary of the thread, in a simple message of one sentence. Examples?
  - Joe is trying to sell you a subscription
  - Alex is following up on last week request regarding the launch of the ABC campaign, but still didn’t send expected reach
• Detect deadlines from emails and notify me accordingly, or create calendar events
• Better spam and phishing detection. Well, it’s not an advanced feature, but we’re still not there yet although it’s 2020

I would amend that list with other ideas I get about making emails better.

What about you, what do you think would turn your daily processing of emails into a better experience?