Gmail: Arrow of Mystery and Subject Line

Raj wrote:   Sep-2-08, 8:14 am

Totally agree...i am not a novice user either but just spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to change the subject line...very annoying. I found this while googling to find a solution. So thanks...it's clearly there now that I know where it is, but why are they still hiding the subject anyways!?

Remi wrote:   Dec-2-07, 8:50 pm

It is rare that a radical new design of an interface really works better than previous systems but Gmail accomplishes this. I think the reason why Gmail tries desparately to keep the Subject line is the same is that it uses the message Subject field as the element that groups all messages in the same “conversation.”

Art wrote:   Oct-7-07, 10:25 pm

I have just got Gmail and it seems mostly pretty fab. It is rare that a radical new design of an interface really works better than previous systems but Gmail accomplishes this. Of course every user who thinks about these things at all will have some suggestions as to design modifications. If they are modifications that could work within the general design, suggest them: perhaps Google will add them. If you

Matthew Cornell wrote:   Jun-3-07, 6:10 am

I *totally* agree regarding the difficulty of editing subject lines. I was about to blog about Gmail needing this feature, when - like you - I discovered they ALREADY HAD IT.

neuromusic wrote:   May-6-07, 10:57 am

To reinforce your argument about the arrow: I just turned on keyboard shortcuts and could not figure out what the purpose of the arrow was. Until now. Thanks!

maninalift wrote:   Apr-18-07, 7:28 am

I have just got Gmail and it seems mostly pretty fab. It is rare that a radical new design of an interface really works better than previous systems but Gmail accomplishes this. Of course every user who thinks about these things at all will have some suggestions as to design modifications. If they are modifications that could work within the general design, suggest them: perhaps Google will add them. If you don't like the system at all are you really saying that it's more clunky and inflexible than webmail or outlook or yahoo. I haven't used the new Hotmail but on the basis of the horrific experience of using the rest of the "Microsoft Network" I'd guess that they probably gave orangutan "teach yourself Java in 7 easy crufts" and told him to think outside the box.

I would like to be able to merge threads though. More sophisticated things like grouping them so that they initially appear as one thread but can be separated would require careful design but I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to click "merge into" then select a thread.

Hanford wrote:   Apr-2-07, 1:07 pm

Andrew wrote:

"With Gmail, everyone is added to your address book automatically"

This is just more proof of the confusing nature of Gmail's address system. Even defenders of Gmail often get it wrong. Often when users have mental models of a system that don't match up in reality, it's the fault of the UI. Gmail indeed does NOT add everyone automatically.

Popcorncandie wrote:   Mar-30-07, 6:45 pm

For the arrow of mystery, if you go into the options and turn the keyshort shortcuts option off the arrow will disappear. Why? I don't know. Maybe it was going to have some function but the G-Gods never finished it or they just haven't specified how to use it. Hope this helps.

Andrew wrote:   Mar-27-07, 12:02 am

"A common way for me (and a lot of other users) to compose a new message is by replying to a message from the person I want to mail, and change the subject line. I do it this way because it’s the fastest way to send an email to someone who’s not in the address book."

With Gmail, everyone is added to your address book automatically, so the quickest way would probably be to compose a new message, then start typing their name/address, it should pick up who you want to send to. Gmail organises messages by conversation, based on subject. To gmail, any message in reply to one of yours with the same subject is another line in the conversation, if the subject changes, so does the conversation. This is why it makes it harder (by one click) to change the subject.

Matt Mylar wrote:   Jan-20-07, 10:43 am

I agree with Bob McCabe. Personally, I think the "G" in "Gmail" stands for "goofy," because that's how it looks to me. The one thing I miss the most in this email program is a flag that says I've replied to a particular message. At first I thought I could just go to the "Sent Mail" view and I would see my latest messages displayed on the top of the various conversation stacks, but that isn't the case. What I see is a snippet of the first message of the conversation on top, not the last. That is misleading too, because the date that is displayed is the date of the most recent message not the date of the first message. To see if I replied to the lastest message, I have to open up that conversation so I can see the headers overlaid and spread out. Goofy!!

Hanford wrote:   Jan-8-07, 2:47 pm

Jim,
Actually Enno 's wrong. I never posted this but after I replied to his comment I did a test and checked the headers. Gmail removes the "in-reply-to" tag if I change the subject line in a reply. Even if there's quoted text from the old message. I'm not doing anything wrong by using "reply" to start a new email.

I think this is the right move. The whole concept of the "thread" as a property independent of "Subject" is just too abstract for it to matter to everyday users. It's hidden, and it's irrelevant. To the majority of email users the Subject is the thread (give of take "re:"s and "fwd:"s) , and when the subject changes, the thread should too. I have a hunch that if Gmail supported to threading the way Enno describes it, the masses would have a fit.

I would love to see an email client support drag and drop ability to merge and separate threads. Imagine dropping one thread onto another to merge them into one (with a confirm or undo!) , or shift-selecting emails in a thread and then breaking them out into their own thread for organizational purposes.

This is the type of organization innovation I was hoping to see in Gmail: Let me decide how I organize my email and make it easy to do so.

Jim wrote:   Jan-8-07, 2:09 pm

My first thought was to have little sympathy for Hanford about the Subject line stuff, because that's how the underlying protocols are supposed to work: reply stays in the thread. But how about bridging the gap on the issues with the Subject line, instead?

Allan and Enno are correct here: changing the Subject line interferes with e-mail threading, and replying to a thread to generate a new message/new thread isn't the "correct" way to do it. Making users take an extra step to muck with the Subject line is a good discouraging method there.

But Hanford is also correct: regardless of what is "correct" with regard to the underlying technology, users have done this for years and will continue to do it, either because they're used to it or because they can or because the UI won't let them do what they really want to do.

The best answer is craft a solution that lets users do what they want to do -- easily send an e-mail to a person whose address they only have in another e-mail -- without damaging reply-to and threading and such.

The first thing that come to mind there is something like a checkbox for "Make this a new thread". Most replies would be appropriate in the old thread, but you could decouple if you wanted to. But then the user has to remember to check the box, and he'll fail to some of the time.

Another answer would be to query the user every time he does a reply but changes the subject line. "Should this be a new thread?" Of course, if the user if just being a good net citizen and changing the subject line to match the morphing thread content, this is annoying.

Better that that might be that if the subject line has changed *and* the content has no quoted content, assume that it's a new thread, since there's nothing to point to it being part of the old one. (Sigh, but some goofs will want it to be, even though it's bad form. Fine: let them have to check a box to keep it in the old thread. Then if they fail to check it, it's their own fault for not crafting good e-mails.)

Bob McCabe wrote:   Dec-19-06, 1:46 pm

I have a question. How do you know which e-mails you have responded to? Sometimes an e-mail says "me, Joe" and sometimes it says "Joe, me". I assume all that means is the ordering. Who e-mail who first, and who responded next. But sometimes I see "Joe, me" and he was the last one to respond - which makes me assume that my initial assumption is wrong. It'd be nice to see an icon for "I was the last one to respond to this thread" or not - something to help you more quickly scan through and help you gauge if you need to respond to something or not. That's the only thing that irks me with g-mail, even though I agree with these comments.

Rod wrote:   Dec-4-06, 5:11 pm

Maybe the emails related to a subject form, not a straight line, but a tree. Newer emails relate to a more specific subject.

Subj: Civil War
Subj: Civil War - General Sherman
Subj: Civil War - General Sherman - Personal Habits

Randy Wong wrote:   Oct-9-06, 6:19 pm

I think the reason why Gmail tries desparately to keep the Subject line is the same is that it uses the message Subject field as the element that groups all messages in the same "conversation." This occurred to me after I noticed a rather large "conversation" filled with emails from multiple parties, unrelated to one another. They clearly weren't responding to each other, nor did they have any idea that each of their messages was being aggregated under one conversation in my Gmail account. Try it: send yourself (or have others send you) emails with the exact same subject. They'll all end up under the same Conversation, unless Gmail's fixed this by now (don't think it has).

Martin wrote:   Aug-21-06, 3:54 am

Have to agree with Hanford here - I wouldn't say I'm a massive volume email user, but I do like to change subject lines. For example, discussing how to achieve something around web development, and one key nugget might come out i the conversation. At that point i typcially change the subject to somerthing very specific so i can just keep it for the next few years in a hints n tips folder (or tag now). not being able to do thqat is becoming frustrating, and I don't think it's the best place to be to have to go and create a new message to facilitate that. Yes, there are ways to store that information separately, but it is niec to have the choice. And for those of us using gmail AND pop3, it means the subjects will not align if we change them in Outlook for example.

Douglas wrote:   Aug-18-06, 6:47 am

The people posting messages to mailing-lists who send bad In-Reply-To headers tend to not be very interesting messages anyway, so it's not really a problem. It's a bit like self censorship.

Hanford wrote:   Aug-15-06, 2:12 am

Enno, Are you talking hypothetically, or are you basing this off of some real-life experience? Because people do indeed "reply" to messages all the time, and quite often they change the subject line while doing so, and in my experience this is not broken way of doing things in any way. It's never been an actual problem.

Re: BTW
Even if it were a real reply (and not a faux reply), it would be just as buried, no? Sounds like a UI problem with the mail client to me.

Enno wrote:   Aug-15-06, 12:09 am

So, would it be rude to point out that startng a new thread in a reply will of course mean that any thread-aware mail client that receives your new email, will happily insert it in the (possibly middle of the) other mail thread? (You're aware that the reply function adds an "In-Reply-To:" header to your mail with the "Message-ID:" of the message you're replying to and thats the principle mechanism for finding the threads and which message branches off which other message...).

What you're really saying is "my lazy inappropriate use of the reply function isn't properly supported by Gmail". Which is tough, but then even in your work you must have made decisions which limit your customers options when they do things which aren't or shouldn't be part of acceptable behaviour (try engaging reverse in your car while your moving forward instead of braking for example... yes it could be engineered so it could work, its just not supported on most if not all of cars on the road and to complain about the grinding noises coming from under the hood is frankly disingenuous to say the least.)

Just my 2c... its not so much a flaw as a disgreement on design philosophy.

E.


(BTW, if you're mailing to people who use a threaded mailer which anchors the thread by the oldest element, rather than the newest like gmail does, they may not even see your faux-reply if you choose an old enough message to reply to and their mailboxes are busy enough. mutt on UNIX systems does this. I love mutt, but the gmail approach seems more sensible to me, now that I've seen it in action.)

Hanford wrote:   Apr-11-06, 1:08 am

Interesting viewpoint, Allan.

I disagee with your assessment.

Subject lines occasionally need to be changed. And Gmail makes it harder than it has to be. That's a bad thing, especially considering gmail's inability to ungroup threads and tag emails individually.

It's not gmail's paradigm that frustrates me -- all these UI issues can be fixed without changing the fundamental qualities of gmail. I find it hard to believe that "it's okay to frustrate old-school users" is a design principle that Google endorses.

Allan wrote:   Apr-10-06, 11:40 pm

I'm way late on the discussion, but since this pops up as #1 for "change gmail subject line", I'll pipe up in defense of GMail and it's UI.

First of all, as Mr. Cutts points out, the arrow only apears once you've turned keyboard short cuts on. If you're educated enough to do this, you can easily find out what it's for and, in fact, it tells you in pretty plain language what it does when you do so--granted most people are too lazy to read what's put in front of them, but that's not a UI fault.

Secondly, the subject line is a _sore_ spot for anyone who deal with large volumes of e-mail and need to keep track of it. People arbitrarily change subject lines of messages for _no_ reason and it's the most annoying thing in the world. GMail attempts to solve this age-old problem by guiding users to _have_ to take an extra step to do this. In my opinion this is a _blessing_ and not something to maligned as ill-conceived.

What I'm reading here are people who are really used to the old-school e-mail program paradigm and when something comes along and challenges their hacked-out way of doing things, they get upset and call it "bad user interface". It's not "bad", it's different; it's better and I, for one, am really happy with it. Don't like it? Turn on POP access and use a more traditional client.

Knowledge Jolt with Jack wrote:   Mar-28-06, 9:02 pm

rant: Gmail is great?

Okay, so I'm sitting here with my mother, who is attempting to learn how to deal with GMail, and I am flabbergasted at how unintuitive some of the interface is with it.

hehupps wrote:   Mar-13-06, 12:03 pm

Since we're at it, flag-up: no ability to sort by unread messages.

For huge inboxes...you'll be paging with "Older" for days to get to all your unread threads. This kills me. I have to actually HUNT for the unread items in the archives so I can get the unread count down to a normal number and feel my inbox is somehwat in order...

Andy wrote:   Mar-10-06, 5:43 am

Hanford:

You have a very vaild point. Who can tell you what you should be frustrated at? Who better understands the average consumer than an average consumer? (Not saying you're average, but if you're upset about it, chances are someone else is)

Programmers and UI designers should spend less time telling people why they "shouldn't" be upset by something, and more time fixing the problems with it. Let's face it: with so many options popping up all over the place, if somthing's not intuitive, people will just run elsewhere.

Hanford wrote:   Mar-9-06, 4:09 pm

Ian, I just wanted to use Reply in order to send a new email/subject to the email author, NOT for fowarding. I do use "forward" for that.

If the person I want to send the email to is not in my contact list, then Reply is the really the only way to send them a new message, short of more-options -> highlight the address -> copy -> Compose -> paste email. Which is more steps.

A hallmark of great UI is allowing the user to do things in the way that makes sense to them. I may not know until finishing my message body that the email deserves a new subject line. But when the subject line is hidden, it makes it harder to do this. This confused me, and I guarantee it confuses others who don't see the "edit subject" link.

Ian wrote:   Mar-8-06, 1:48 am

Well if you are sending the message to someone else, then you should use 'Forward'. That's what 'Forward' is for, and by default GMail shows the subject line that time.

The arrow by the way only appears if you've gone and turned on keyboard shortcuts. A Google engineer has blogged about it a bit here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-not-the-only-annoyed-one/

Not that I'm saying that the GMail UI is perfect, it isn't, but it's leagues above anything else out there. If you wanted two UI problems, I'd flag up:
- No reply/forward at the top of the first message
- No add label for draft messages

James Cridland wrote:   Mar-7-06, 12:16 pm

Outlook Web Access is nice (I have it at work), but Gmail is actually nicer. For me.

I prefer Gmail as an email client over Apple Mail (eurgh, hateful); over Outlook (horrid bloaty software), and even over Thunderbird. It's my main mail client, and if you wanted to take it away, I'd fight you.

Hanford wrote:   Mar-6-06, 1:28 pm

pwb, they're just pointing out how it works, I wouldn't say they're wrong.

pwb wrote:   Mar-6-06, 12:47 pm

I can't stand responses like Mike and Darkness, so matter-of-fact but dead wrong. C'mon guys!

I'm not a Microsoft apologist, but I find Outlook Web Access to be far and away the best web-based mail service.

Alex wrote:   Mar-6-06, 11:46 am

GMail automatically adds email adressess to its contact list as you send out mail. If you've ever replied to a message, the person you replied to will be listed if you were to look for them. Now, all I'm doing is adding what I've learned since using GMail, and I'm not saying your arguments aren't valid. In fact I think I'm proving your point that GMails UI is hard to intially graspe because these points should be instantly understandable, and not require a blog post to uncover.

-ALEX

Hanford wrote:   Mar-6-06, 11:43 am

Except that Gmail will actually add people to your contacts list for you if you’ve received more than a couple of emails from them.
Not in my experience. I have over 140 emails from a single address who's not in my contact list.

This is a predictability issue. If I can't predict who's in my list, I can't rely on it. It only takes a couple of unsuccessful attempts to do it one way before some users will give up.

Darkness Productions wrote:   Mar-6-06, 6:26 am

That only works if the person’s email address is in the Contacts list. Since I don’t keep a mental inventory of who’s in my contact list and who’s not, replying then changing the subject is the best way for me to go.
Except that Gmail will actually add people to your contacts list for you if you've received more than a couple of emails from them. It's a nice feature, and since they add it to the main contacts list, but not the Frequently Mailed list, it stays out of the way.

Elmer wrote:   Mar-6-06, 2:08 am

I also found that missing subject field (when replying to a Gmail message) a bit annoying. Though I seldom change subjects, there are times when I need to change it (such as when I realize I made a subject spelling mistake on the thread I created).

I thought this is the way a "threaded" e-mail is to be handled same way as in forums. But still it should have been better if there was a way to edit it so people will see the appropriate subject line (whether using Gmail or Yahoo!).

Good thing I was not the only one who felt strange and there is someone who put it into his blog.

Hanford wrote:   Mar-5-06, 7:36 pm

>I don’t think that little arrow sitting there hurt your user experience.
You're right, it didn't hurt per se. It bothered me though, kind of like the switch with the cryptic icon on my dashboard of my car. What does it do? I don't know. If I don't understand what somehing like the gmail arrow does at first glance, I hope a bit of experiementation will uncover it. When I can't, it bothers me. I feel like the software is humiliating me a bit. Oh well.

>You can just hit “c” to bring up the compose message page and then start typing the first few letters of the person you want to send the email to, select it from the list and voila.
That only works if the person's email address is in the Contacts list. Since I don't keep a mental inventory of who's in my contact list and who's not, replying then changing the subject is the best way for me to go.

I know most of my gripes with gmail don't apply to everyone; I'm just voicing my own problems becuase I think it's better than staying silent.

Mike wrote:   Mar-5-06, 5:42 pm

I don't think that little arrow sitting there hurt your user experience.

Meanwhile, it allows me to be extremely lazy when viewing my email by just hitting a few keys to check my mail.

As for changing the subject line, Google should make it more obvious, but that isn't a high priority for me.
I'm not big into changing the subject line:
You can just hit "c" to bring up the compose message page and then start typing the first few letters of the person you want to send the email to, select it from the list and voila.

CheeseHead wrote:   Mar-5-06, 4:53 pm

Matt Cutts has responded to your post here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-not-the-only-annoyed-one/

Hanford wrote:   Mar-5-06, 4:18 pm

I never would have figured that out. Unbelievably weird.

Again I'd like to mention that my point here is not that the arrow didn't have a purpose, just that the purpose is a mystery that isn't trivial to solve. Knowing what it does doesn't make my original issue with it any less relevant.

Mark Casey wrote:   Mar-5-06, 3:32 pm

The arrow indicates which email the keyboard commands will work on. If the arrow is on the first email and you want to open the 3rd email down by using a keyboard command, for example, you hit "j" two times (the arrow moves down one conversation each time) then press "o" to open the email.