Gmail’s best features don’t send emails
Google's Gmail is one of the world's most popular email hosts. But two of their best features don’t send emails at all. In fact, they actively prevent emails from being sent.
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The “Undo Send” feature does exactly what it says - it gives you the opportunity to hit undo and unsend an email - as if it had never been sent. It’s not a “recall email” feature, which sheepishly asks the reader’s email client to delete the message (and might not work). This one always works.
Image from the Google blog: “How to undo send in Gmail for up to 30 seconds”
This feature was originally made available as an experimental “Labs” feature in 2009, and was still significant enough to warrant reporting in the New York Times when it launched in 2015. As suggested by the time limit, it holds your email in a staging area and only sends it after a short waiting period.
You can proofread an email a dozen times and still not find a mistake. Hit “Send”, and suddenly it hits you with a cold realization. It’s better than a confirmation dialog - the beauty of Undo Send is that it lets you almost-make the mistake, catch it in the new already-”sent” context, and prevent it with no real harm.
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While Undo Send is broadly useful, the “Forgotten Attachment Detector” is laser-focused on one common mistake:
This feature was released in 2008 (also as an experimental “Labs” feature initially), and became a standard feature for all users in 2010. It’s certainly saved me on many occasions since then. Everyone has made this mistake before, and the Forgotten Attachment Detector swoops in to save them; inboxes worldwide, rejoice.
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For a truly great user experience, it’s not just enough to send and receive emails. It’s important to help users avoid common errors and mistakes. To err is human, and recent trends in technology suggest that we’re about to enter a world where machines err all the time, too. So every system needs to be designed to tolerate errors and pitfalls (or face the consequences).
I’ve grown more attached to the word “pitfall” ever since I read this blog post about forgiveness mechanics from Eva Grouling Snider:
In platform video games – from the original Super Mario Bros. (1985) to more modern platformers like Celeste (2018) – you control a character who makes often difficult jumps across gaps, spikes, or other hazards. One trick developers use to make these games feel better to play is “coyote time.”
Named after the Wile E. Coyote cartoon, coyote time is a brief period of time after running off a platform where the game will still register the player pressing the jump button. This means that players don’t have to be absolutely perfect to complete a jump – there’s a small amount of wiggle room. As a result, players are less likely to be frustrated by the feeling that they actually did make the jump, but the game didn’t recognize their input.
Coyote time in Celeste (2018)
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Celeste is still a very challenging game, but by adding in coyote time (and many other forgiveness mechanics like it), the developers keep it from feeling frustrating and punishing.
Eva Grouling Snider on The Teaching Innovation Blog: “Coyote Time: What Games Can Teach Us About Forgiveness in Learning”
In a perfect world, we’d be able to build a system which is flexible and powerful yet totally foolproof. In reality, almost every feature that increases flexibility and power also introduces opportunities for error: new pits for our users to fall into. How can we detect those possibly-dangerous situations and give our users the chance to jump to safety? (Or really fall in the pit, if that’s what they intended?)
On paper, these two Gmail features prevent the sending of emails! But users don’t want to literally send every email; they want to send those emails to the right people, with the right content, at the right time.