Not Invented Here

On July 1st, Gmail launched a revised version of their label system. Several users have complained about it. Myself included.

It actually took me awhile to start using labels at all. Google definitely has its own ideas about how email should work, and it has not always an easy path to acceptance for me. Early on the concept of search instead of folders was difficult to grasp, and labels didn't really seem to cut it.

After a few years I found I had started to embrace the label system. And then the Right Side Labels Lab launched! Suddenly my Label usage skyrocketed. I could keep my 80+ labels visible at all times without having to scroll past the system labels and other various gadgets I had installed on the left side. I discovered how nicely the filter and label systems worked together and started to see the benefits of the Inbox Zero way of life.

The newly launched label system has one feature I like a lot. The ability to choose which labels (system or otherwise) are visible where the system labels live is a great improvement! With so many labels, and no ability to specify a hierarchy, it had been difficult to distinguish the important labels from the ones that were of lesser importance.

Where this launch failed is the fact that the old floating label module has been retired entirely.

Now that labels aren't in their own little box and take up much less space, moving them around the screen didn't seem as important. We realize quite a few of you used and liked Right-side Labels, so if you feel strapped for left nav screen real estate without it, try turning on Right-side Chat in Labs instead.

Right side chat? Really? That is supposed to help me if I'm "strapped for left nav screen real estate" when I have 80+ labels?

Here is the thing. I have 1200 vertical pixels max. Between the standard system labels, Remember the Milk gadget, Google Calendar gadget and the Google Docs gadget, there was very little real estate available to begin with. I now have the choice of either burying those gadgets completely or burying my labels and run the risk of missing some important emails dropping into those labels.

Launch issues

For many users (myself included), the launch of the new label system did not happen very smoothly. The Right Side Labels Lab was disabled immediately but the new label system was not available. This left the old label module suddenly located on the left side on top of the rest of my gadgets. I spent about half an hour trying to figure out why this was the case before I gave up. I ended up learning about the upcoming new label system launch from TechCrunch ten minutes later.

It took several hours (five or so) before I saw the new label system rolled out for my account. Had they delayed the removal of Right Side Labels Lab until the new label system was ready for my account, I might have approached the whole thing differently. As it was, having functionality pulled out from under me and learning about it from a second hand source already put a sour taste in my mouth for whatever was to come.

Communication is important  Gmail has been really good about this in the past, though it has been rather hit or miss for Labs features. To date this is probably the worst experience I have had with a Gmail feature launch and it was largely due to a lack of communication.

New label system usability

From a usability perspective, the new label system is far more difficult for what should be trivial tasks like quickly scanning labels for changes in unread message counts. Before, I was able to do this by simply scrolling.  Now, I have to click the "77 more" link, scroll, then decide to click or not. If I choose to click, the label list hides itself. If I chose not to click, I need to hit escape to close the label list.

This might not seem like a big deal, but I do did this constantly. Adding a click and a keypress to an operation that is done constantly when no keypress or click was required before is a big deal.

I realize that this new label system is probably perfect for newbie or lite users who have 10-20 labels. Anyone who starts using Gmail today will probably be more likely to use labels often and earlier than I did a few years ago. At some point, though, I feel that these users are going to become more dependant on labels and this system is going to start annoying them as well.

Now what?

As of now, there is little choice but to live with the new system. In the future, there are a few things that I think could help make things more usable again.

Layout allows all gadgets and features to float to the right

Given how thorough Google generally is on their minimalistic UI, I would find it pretty hard to believe that all of the modules on the Gmail page are not already able to be moved to the right column. If I could move RTM, Google Calendar and Google Docs to the right column, I would be able to show all of my labels and be more or less where I started before the new label system launched.

This would remove the nice feature of being able to select a smaller number of "important" labels as it would flatten everything again, but it would allow me to save a lot of extra clicks and keypresses and minimize the chances I might miss something important. I think it would be a nice trade.

A Lab that resembles the old Labels module

This is a no brainer. It should be pretty trivial for a Google engineer to whip this up. I keep checking labs hoping someone has done just that. Two weeks out and still nothing.

Both of these!

In a perfect world, both of these options would be available to get us power users back where we started plus also having the ability to sticky some of our more important labels under the inbox.

Lessons learned

I have seen many people talking fondly about Gmail Labs and how it is a great way to ease people into new features instead of forcing people to use features they may not (yet) be interested in. So for the life of me, I cannot understand why Gmail removed the label module instead of doing what it has done countless times in the past: create two lab features, "Drag and Drop Labels" and "Custom System Labels" and promote them so that people would know they were there.

I guess it makes sense if Labs are largely 20% projects and this new Label thing was a core upgrade (which seems to be the case) but this has had a huge impact on my ability to use Gmail effectively. I wonder, what will Google take away from an experience like this where a 20% solution being replaced by a core feature upgrade draws this much fire?

I say "this much fire," but really have no idea how much impact our hundred or so voices  alone will ever have on Google. It is at times like this that I wonder, "where was I when they were doing their usability studies?" Who are these people they talked to? How many of them had 50+ labels vs. users who had none or only a handful? How many of them were first time users?

Apparently Right Side Labels Lab was only "moderately popular" but nowhere near the top 10. What exactly are the top 10 labs features? That would be a fun chart to see. And on the note of popularity and how many users are using a specific feature, maybe only a small percentage of users had Right Side Labels Lab enabled, but every Gmail user used to have the Labels module enabled. Seems like that would make it pretty "popular."