Best of Both Worlds: Improving Gmail Labels with the Affordances of Folders
Venue
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2010, ACM
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Kerry Rodden, Michael Leggett
BibTeX
Abstract
Gmail’s filing system for email conversations is based around labels, which are
more flexible and powerful than folders. With its original user interface, many
users did not discover labels, and wondered why Gmail had no folders. The Gmail
team redesigned the user interface for labeling to make it more discoverable and
understandable, and to add the most useful functionality of folders. The new design
works for the simple use case (a conversation with only one label), while still
making the more complex use case (multiple labels) easily available. It has been
launched to millions of users worldwide and has resulted in much higher adoption of
labels, especially by new users of Gmail.
