The Problem

"Email inboxes are overflowing with emails. People get a mix of emails, ranging from objectively bad junk to critically important communication... Design an email application that makes it easy to stay on top of important communication in your life."

Shankar Balasubramanian, Interaction Designer at Gmail, Google

Research

To start, we surveyed 177 students at Indiana University Bloomington with Google Form. The age of our target population age from 18 to 22. Gmail (92.7%) or/and Outlook (82.5%) are the primary email platforms for them. From our primary research, we found that:

User Archetypes

From our research, we identified three user groups common amog college students:

We focused on the Effort Minimizer and the Average User types, helping them de-clutter inbox effortlessly.

Solutions: IRA (Importance Ranking Assistant)

Feature 1 - Importance Toggle Button

Turn the toggle on to display only important emails flagged by users, ranked according to the AI-assisted category order.

Research suggests that relevance-based mail search, which ranks email search results by relevance rather than chronological order, helps users find desired emails more effectively in modern settings

Feature 2 - AI-Power Categories Ranking

IRA learns from user behavior using back-end data and pop-up prompts to prioritize importance categories. These categories are arranged in the same order in the side menu and emails on the important toggle page, helping users stay on top of their priorities

Research identified opportunities to develop a model for scoring email importance to help automate inbox management.

Feature 3 - Customizing Ranking

Users can add custom categories to the default list and reorder them using a sliding feature to create a personalized hierarchy

Feature 4 - Sender’s List

Rank and manage all senders on this tab to perform bulk actions like assigning category, deleting, or marking as important