In a
previous article the question whether Google Wave can tackle the ever growing inbox was raised. A few tips were tossed, mainly suggesting user discipline assisted by Google Wave.
I haven’t played with Google Wave yet, my thoughts in this article are solely based on screenshots of the Google Wave client (see for example Figure 1). But when I compare those screenshots of the Google Wave client to Gmail it seems to me there’s not much difference. We still have a central inbox, only now it contains waves. While I love the wave concept, I fear Wave extensions and robots will only increase the size of our inboxes.
Figure 1. Google Wave. Source: The Official Google BlogThere’s no doubt waves have the potential of drastically changing communication and collaboration. However, assuming the screenshots are representative, I do doubt the current Google Wave client will improve the management of my inbox. In this article I will try to figure out a way to collect and present waves to the user without cluttering their inbox.
Inbox vs. Archiving
On of the key points from the
previous article is to delete, act on and/or archive mails in your inbox. This in fact got me wondering, how or what do I actually archive? In my case, I have about 1400 messages in my inbox, another 1300 archived. Archived mails mostly include newsletters, iTunes receipts, serial number of programs I bought, et cetera. On the contrary, my inbox contains all kinds of mails, but mostly conversations with contacts. This means my archive is actually cleaner or better structured than my inbox! Or at least the way I am archiving is not sufficient to cover all emails in my inbox.
Before going further, let’s take a look at some other inboxes.
Snail mail Regardless what you do once you’ve opened the envelope and read your mail, you never put it back into the mailbox! In the laziest case, you either throw it away or put it on a pile. Otherwise you classify the mail in categories such as correspondences, bills, magazines, commercial, ... Mostly without even realizing.
Task Managers They often provide an inbox for quickly gathering new tasks from emails, sms, webpages, et cetera. Once you have a spare moment of time, you start labeling the tasks, pick a due date and assign them to projects or more general context (cfr. GTD).
By some mysterious mechanism these kinds of inboxes end up empty. Mysterious? No. Snail mail of course takes up physical volume which is either limited by your mailbox or your hallway. Regarding task managers, I guess we simply prefer shorter task lists over longer ones.
So do we need ways to classify waves in our inbox? We already have labels and filters, you say? True. We all know the combination of labels and search serves as an alternative to folders, that’s what Gmail is about and Google Wave seems to use the same principles. However, labeled e-mail keeps sitting in front of us in the bloated inbox unless we archive it which is just putting it on a second pile. So there’s actually no real difference between the Wave inbox and the Wave archive. Both pile up to a confusing mess of waves which we have to query to find anything (luckily Google is good at that).
Another View
So we need ways to classify waves and move them
out of our inbox. We need to bring some of the inbox cleaning mechanisms from snail mail and task managers to the wave inbox.
So let’s start with automatically moving waves out of the inbox once we’ve opened the wave and start classifying the wave right away. The default classification could be archive. I know, now we’re creating one big pile again, but let’s take the Gmail concept of labeling and saved searches to a higher level. Since we can expect an explosion of robots and gadgets, we can use them for a more intelligent classification (even before we opened the wave).
In my eyes the central view on Google Wave should be something along the lines of Figure 2; an (almost) empty inbox and saved searches. I call those saved searches views on my wave collection. Like the current filtering system, we can create views based on labels, based on contacts (Friends, Family, ...), but also based on collaborations and documents (Project X, Project Y, ...), based on robots (Facebook, Bloggie, ...), based on gadgets (Chess, polls, ...), date ranges and so on.
You might even go as far as deleting the notion of an inbox altogether and simply define a view of new waves. Conceptually this is even more beautiful.
Figure 2. A mockup of the concept of Views in Google Wave.You’ll notice each view has a badge counting the number of new waves for that view. We could even add more badges such as a badge for the number of active waves. Views based on robots and gadgets could define their own badges. For example, Taskie may count the pending tasks, while Facebookie counts the number of updates and wall posts separately, ...
So with one eye drop on this Google Wave mockup I see what’s actually new in my inbox, using the top view icons I see a summary of new, active or otherwise classified waves in my wave collection. Those are positioned central instead of tucked away in a sidebar. Finally, the active view presents me a filtered list of only those waves I am currently interested in.
Start
While Google say they started with the question “What would email be like if it was invented today?”, I can’t help but think they actually started with “So we have our mails in Gmail, what else can we add?”. They’ve build an amazing platform, but it’s not quite there yet. However, I think under the Google Wave hood we have the right engine to go beyond Gmail on Waves and change our views on waves.
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