The Integrative Stream

Design for Users

The lead designer of GMail had a post on the Google Blog yesterday, commenting on the “birthday” of email (Guess what just turned 34?).

The history stuff is nice, but the interesting bit is the technology vision for the GMail product itself:

Of course that wasn’t the only reason why I wanted to build Gmail. I rely on email, a lot, but it just wasn’t working for me. My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble; sometimes four different people would all reply to the same message with the same answer because they didn’t notice the earlier replies. I couldn’t always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it. With Gmail I got the opportunity to change email – to build something that would work for me, not against me.

He’s right. This is exactly how one should go about building good software: create something that works with the users, not against them. I couldn’t sum it up better. If you want to create software that people will use, this is the mental framework to use.

The post goes on to mention that Google’s philosophy is to give users as much as possible, and to make it free whenever possible. That is, of course, a somewhat disingenous statement, at least at the corporate level, since that’s not Google’s raison d’etre at all. Google exists to create opportunities to show advertising, and simply happens to do it by creating valuable information utilities. It is not a charity, however heavily subsidized by the public markets. But I digress.