Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Khalid Al-Jaaidi

It’s been 2 years since Dropbox dropped a $100 mil on the Mailbox team’s table, and swindled them into ‘the acquired startups that will never see the light again’ land. I was one of the early adopters of the app, little did I know it will change the way I treat the inbox, forever. So naturally ever-since then I’ve been looking for a replacement.

Disclaimer: I’m not paid for this. This is simply my struggle with email clients since Mailbox gave me a taste of the goods and shut down.

I can finally confidentially say I found the best email client replacement.

Sure it took 2 years (well 1.5 years and 0.5 years scruitinizing the replacement in every way), but you know what they say, better late than never so without further ado..

Meet Newton — Promo video

Here’s the thing, I love beautiful apps. Better yet, beautifully designed powerful apps that conceal their genius and power lest you be overwhelmed.

Lesson 01: Less is truly more.

Michael Horton

This is especially true since it seems to be making a come back in recent years. Read on the self-coined new trend term — Complexion Reduction

In hopes of not sounding like a 2009 broken record, but..just look at this

The moment I saw the create email screen I fell in love on sight.

Lesson 02: Personality backed by strong execution goes way further than strong execution alone.

Let’s be real, space is cool

You’re constantly reminded that you’re about to launch into space out of awesomeness and they don’t shy away from it. At first I paid no mind to all this beautiful graphics work, for I have lived long enough to not get swindled by good looks alone, but it has long grown on to me. I quite enjoy all the little nuggets of space reference they hid around their app building an important part of the second lesson, brand affinity.

Okay back to what really cuts the bread

Lesson 03: Features that actually matter.

I don’t quite know how they manage to do it, but the precentage of truely useful and unique features, that are perfectly implemented are much much higher than the 1–3 features they could let go of, or could have been built better. But then again I’m sure they have their adoption data on them they’ll know what to do with them.

One thing for sure though, having a clean slate of simplicity allows you to integrate and shine on what truely matters, easier than starting with a plate full of everything like your buffet dish, and trying to add dessert on top of it too.

Finally, an inbox (and interface) that doesn’t look like a jet planes control panel.

I bet those double blue checkmarks look pretty familiar. I won’t get into the details of it’s awesome features, you can find that out on their website

In fact the whole read-receipt feature is so awesome it should be illegal.

Lesson 04: Consistent Experience

No matter what device you have (that isn’t a Blackberry or Windows Phone), using Newton on it is a breeze. They also opted for server synced accounts — like Mailbox did, in which you create an account with the service, set it up once, and then just login with your username and password on every device you want to use it on.

So thats all your device-specific independent settings, and mail accounts all synced around at lightening speed including all the mail accounts you add on any one device.

If you don’t want your work email on your personal phone, just disable notifications on it completely and have your app open by default to your personal inbox, done.

On top of all that, last but not least, the excellent and rock solid backend that powers their servers runs solid. 99.9% reliability is real.

Lesson 05: Consistent Support

And active development.

I don’t have a way of showing an excellent stream of consistent updates and improvements, but that builds major — major trust for a company and a team in this day and age. I can’t think of anyway that it might have better if they haven’t opted out to release consistent agile small updates and feature by feature approach. Everytime a new feature that was useful came out you knew it was gonna be an awesome day.

This has been consistent with them eversince the early days when it was beta and called CloudMagic.

Lesson 06: Keyboard Shortcuts

For the power users is like a blessing released upon our specie.

I can’t rage about how awesome a product team is that considers their power users with simple powerful and well thought out keyboard shortcuts.

I love keyboard shortcuts is an understatement, I wish I could control my life with a keyboard and a bunch of shortcuts.

It’s no secret that my top 3 apps all utilize powerful keyboard shortcuts I don’t have to click a single thing (unless it was faster to do so).

Newton (left), Things (middle), Bear (right).

(Bonus) Lesson 07: Support a good habit

I haven’t seen this done with a spotlight but, many products are designed in a way to invoke and built a habit in people. Would be interesting if they also implemented a personal habit challenge sort of thing, afterall it takes about 30 days for a habit to stick with someone.

If you don’t control your habits, your habits will control you.

One habit I wanted to build, I knew I personally had issues with, is replying to emails. Even If I knew what the answer was to an email I just read, sometimes I’d procastinate doing that massively for no apparent reason. I knew then it was a matter of habit. I managed to change it with some support of features that build on the habit. I can list multiple apps that have features to build on their core habit building functions but I’ll keep it short and focused for now.

With Newton, the methodology is, if its actionable right now, keep it in your inbox, if not then do something with it. You could:

Archive it.
Snooze it (to have it pop up later in your inbox at a specific time, or when you switch to the Desktop app).
Delete or move it to a folder.

When you DO want to action it you could:

Reply (obviously).
Send an email at a later time (Incredible!)

Imagine this hypothetical situation that happens often, you send an email, you know this person probably won’t reply for a week (bad email habits right?), so you already know you’ll want to follow up in a few days or whatever so..

You can send the email.
Open the email back again, send a follow up email and mark it as send later (3 days later maybe)
And finally set the later email to not send if the person replied before then.
Profit.

Conclusion

Good product design is an excellent collaboration of superstar tech, superstar design, superstar product, and most importantly your users. I’ll let someone smarter than me conclude this post:

“In the past couple of decades a paradigm shift took place in large corporations towards the philosophy of putting the “customer first.” This paradigm traditionally applies to service and support, but also has been applied to product design.

Companies are finding that as global competition increases, fewer people are beating a path to their doors. Rather than creating a product internally, and then hiring marketing and sales people to persuade customers to buy it, companies are taking a closer look at what customers need. They are designing products that will sell on their own merit.”

Excerpt From: Indi Young. “Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.”

7 Lessons in Product Design by simply Meeting Newton was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

7 Lessons in Product Design by simply Meeting Newton

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