For my first major project at Google, I worked with the Gmail team on a set of features that allowed users to easily view and act on important emails sent by automatically by companies. I designed the UI and the overall system of UI components, as well as explanatory diagrams used throughout developer documentation and at Google I/O in 2013.
Actions in the Inbox
Over 90% of a Gmail user's inbox consists of mail sent from companies — bills from your credit card company, receipts from an online store, or coupons and ads from clothing companies. Some emails like calendar invites only require a simple yes or no response, and some emails only contain links to websites, like delivery confirmation emails that have package tracking links. With the help of partners like Foursquare and Mailchimp, we designed and tested a set of UI components that bring some of the most interactive bits of information up to your inbox without having to dive deep into an email message.
Live Summaries
There are emails in your inbox today from big companies that have super important information, but the experience of reading through them to get to that important stuff can be frustrating. Information could be out of date or buried amidst a lot of clutter. To solve this problem, we designed a system that summarizes and shows the most information stuff in certain types of emails and uses Google's intelligence to make sure the information we show is up-to-date. The first set of emails we focused on designing around were flight confirmation emails. We created a UI that showed updated flight times, gate information, and confirmation numbers in a small card above the email. The next iteration of this project evolved into Google Inbox's Highlights UI, which I also designed.