Over the span of two-and-a-half years, I worked on a small team of designers, developers, and product managers experimenting and crafting Google's vision for the future of email. Inbox was designed around letting users quickly understand what's in their email and helping them complete tasks associated with those emails. It was launched in October 2014 as an entirely new, cross-platform email product backed by Gmail's reliability and Google's machine intelligence.
Highlights
One of our hero features at launch was Highlights, a system of UI components designed to show useful, small bits of information like up-to-date package tracking information or summaries of credit card bills before a user opens any message. I designed the entire system to be consistent across platforms, and in an extensible way that allows the team to extend Highlights to new types of email in the future. At launch, highlights was called out as the most impressive new feature of Inbox in reviews by Steven Levy, Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, and Alyssa Bereznak of Yahoo! Tech.
Inbox on Android
In addition to developing the entire design system around Highlights, I also led design for Inbox on Android. We were one of the first apps to debut with a full, cross-platform Material experience, so I worked closely with the team to make sure that the design system would work well on Android. Also, given Android's diverse ecosystem, I ensured that our ultimate design would work consistently across differently sized Android phones and tablets.