I think this hints at the future of "electronic mail".
Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all of them in a single list without distinction.
Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").
I loved Gmail when it was a kick-ass email client in the browser. I was okay with the labels, even though their IMAP implementation was dubious. I was kind of meh about their ham filter, since I usually go for inbox zero.
Anyway, I left gmail a while ago, and really haven't looked back. It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email. More like the kind of value-added services we see popping up and dying everywhere on the web, and less like the basic infrastructure kind of thing it started out as.
I think we agree about the usefulness of things like the Promotions tab, but I just never turned it on. It's not really a big deal.
Meanwhile my mom loves the email promotions she's signed up for (if only she would stop forwarding me ones every few days...), so something like this is great for her. Different strokes and all that, and it doesn't degrade my experience by existing. Seems like a win.
> It seems to transform into its own thing, somewhat tangential to traditional email.
Email itself has transformed into its own thing, "somewhat tangential to traditional email". Email is now used for a host of interactions that extend far beyond its roots. GMail is adapting to meet those usage patterns.
I'm not calling your choice to move wrong - you may not use email for all the things the GMail is attempting to account for. But it would be foolish for GMail to stop adapting.
If it's just the newer interface that you dislike, Google still offers the classic Gmail inbox. It's what I personally use because it's at least twice as fast as the fully-loaded view and I never use any of the new features anyway. It sure beats actually paying for something like Fastmail.
That said, I find the tabs much more useful in the mobile client. One reason is that I only get push notifications for emails in my primary tab.
They moved newsletters, promotions and other commercial email into Promotions and now they're reformatting the parsable ones into ads.
From an email marketing perspective, I'm torn. I can definitely put out offers like this if that's what Google makes me do it. They'll probably be pretty visible too! Maybe I'll sell more. Unfortunately, we'll have to figure out other ways to communicate with people when we're not selling them something. (which is almost all the time)
The cynic in me thinks this is just a prelude to charging me to email my gmail customers, though. In line with Facebook's paid promotion features. Hope not. That would be dirty pool for an open protocol like email...
This seems quite similar to the design AOL's Alto [1] used. I actually used Alto for a while, but found that the promotional images were less helpful than the short blurbs Gmail had already for quickly figuring out if I wanted to open a message, even one promotional in nature.
I'm still confused why anyone would be using the tab system - a good set of filters will do the same thing, be more customizable, and won't take up another 30px of vertical screen real estate.
I'm also not sure why anyone would knowingly tab over to a big page of ads. (Even with the "Categories" view disabled, Google continues to label my messages for these tabs. For me, though, 90% of the messages under "Promotions" are IEEE bulletins, and the rest are from mailing lists from which I unsubscribe as soon as I see them.) I find the idea of encouraging users to embrace advertising through e-mail to be just kind of gross.
Yes. It's a usability nightmare. I can't do it for all messages at once..., if I scroll down the tab is gone... hell I can't even move messages to the Inbox.. only labels and other tabs are possible.
My promotions tab is 3rd party emails. It will be interesting to see how this looks, will they make thumbnails of promotion emails or pick an image? How will this affect statistics for folk at Mailchimp et al? what about the little guy who sends a couple of hundred promotions out via a Mailchimp? Will their 'open' stats be skewed?
My visits to the promotions tab has been reduced to 0-1 time a month since their introduction. I guess they need to try something to get those visits back?
Why would Google want to get those visits back? Things in the promotions tab are essentially competing against Google's own ads in Gmail so it probably benefits Google that you don't look at them.
Since email is used for everything from long highly personal missives to "your packaged has shipped" to "SALE! SALE! SALE!" it makes no sense to present all of them in a single list without distinction.
Better to separate them out and display them in a manner that makes sense wrt their content: personal stuff in a traditional inbox, promotions shown as an easily scannable ad-like format, and transactional / notification messages maybe as a stack of cards with action buttons ("confirm subscription").