Gmail Turns 18, Has 3 Billion Users! A Product Lead Breaks Down How Gmail Stays Interesting
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This April, Gmail will be 18 years old. That’s a big milestone, given that email as a medium just turned 50.
Launched in 2004—with its 1 GB free storage, conversation based grouping, and enhanced search capabilities—Gmail quickly became one of the most popular email services in the world.
What started off as Paul Buchheit’s side project is now part of Google Workspace, a solution that’s used by over 3 billion users.
Yet despite this growth and Gmail’s long history, the product continues to find new ways to delight its users with great experiences, new features, and constant innovation.
How does the product team do it?
To help us unpack this question, I interviewed Matthew Izatt, Product Lead for Gmail.
Matthew has been building and growing Gmail for the last 10+ years. He started off in mobile where he built the Android and iOS apps for Gmail, and eventually he became the lead product owner for all of Gmail’s front end. He also led the development of the new Gmail in 2018, which was a complex rebuild of the technical architecture and visual design, along with the addition of multiple enterprise focused features. Since then, he has been leading Google’s charge on redefining how we work as the product lead for the Workspace Platform and Partnerships efforts with a team of over 100.
What follows is an edited version of our interview.
Mustafa Kapadia: Matt, thank you for joining us. Now, before we jump into how your team does its magic, can you please share with me some of the challenges you face when you build a new feature or experience on Gmail?
Matthew Izatt: Thanks Mustafa. And I think this is a great place to start.
One of the biggest challenges is that Google Workspace is used by over 3 billion users, and while that is great, there are many different ways of using our product. It’s not like a doorbell, where there is only one way of using it. With Gmail, it’s like an infinite Swiss army knife, where everyone has their own favorite way of using the product.
Second, Gmail is a critical product for many of our users. Yes, it’s fun to use, but people use it to get important work done—sending job proposals, emailing with their kids’ teachers, or booking medical appointments. This is why we have to be careful about what we experiment with and what we roll out. We can’t just throw things out there and see what works. We have to do our homework.
Third, we have to constantly innovate and think outside the box. Email is an old product, but it continues to evolve. Every day we have new startups reinventing email and challenging the big players. If we are to remain a market leader, we literally have to rethink the product every few years. Which is why creating the new Gmail was so much fun.
Mustafa: I don’t envy you. This is not an easy product to build. Going back to something you touched on: Given these hurdles, how do you build these great experiences? Is there an example that you can share with us?
Matt: A specific example I always like to share is the story of how we came up with the right display density on our thread list. The thread list is your inbox; it’s the list of all the messages that you have. The display density is how that information is presented to you.
In Gmail you can choose to have fewer messages with a lot of information about each message. Or you can choose to see a larger number of messages with much less information about each message.
It really comes down to your preferences. And it’s one of the reasons why so many users like using Gmail. In fact, being able to set inbox display preferences is actually one of the top 10 most used settings within Gmail.
Mustafa: So you were really trying to give users choice on how they would like their information presented?
Matt: Exactly. Now, we could have added 100 different levers so that every user could customize their email feed to an infinite degree. While that is possible from a coding perspective, it’s not practical for three reasons.
First, infinite choice sounds good on paper, but in reality, too many options creates a confusing user experience. Second, development would take many months—maybe even a year. And third, it would be a long-term maintenance nightmare.
Mustafa: So how did you go about doing it? Share with me the inner workings of Gmail in Google Workspace. How is the sausage made?
Matt: Well, it came down to four key steps, working closely with our amazing UX Research team.
First came the primary research to find out if building this experience was worth doing. After all, what is the point of building it if no one wants it? For this we actually sat down with real users inside and outside of Google to understand their needs.
Second, we brainstormed 100 potential solutions and narrowed them down to 8 options. Then we mocked up each of the 8 options to see how they looked.
While it would have been easy to just pick the option we liked the most and build it, we wanted to create what our users want, not what we like the most. So we took those options and surveyed the users from step 1 again. We specifically asked them to rank their preferences across three dimensions: Love It, Hate It, or Meh!
Based on the user responses, we realized that 3 configurations would meet the needs of most users. These were the three options we developed and deployed to Google Workplace.
Mustafa: I love how you used data to guide your decision of what to build. This really is Google’s secret sauce—first-hand data collected from users.
Matt: Absolutely. Without their feedback, we would have never been able to narrow down to the 3 options that would satisfy most of our users.
Mustafa: Talking about risks: Getting user feedback and validating before you build is one way to de-risk your product, but you even de-risked your product launch strategy, correct?
Matt: Yes. Sometimes we launch features individually. Sometimes we launch them as a group. In this particular case, we had a lot of moving parts. We had a complete UI redesign, 10 or 12 new features, and architecture changes.
So to de-risk this, we put in place—I kid you not—a 26-stage launch process. We started off with the technical architecture changes—stuff that the user would not notice—to make sure that it was working. And we did it in small increments.
Then we rolled out a few features at a time, launching it first to our early access program—where users have opted in to receive updates. We measured their reaction and satisfaction first, and then moved on to the next group.
At every stage, we kept our blast radius small and put in these checks and balances where we could launch, measure reaction, and then reassess our strategy. And that worked out pretty well for us for this massive launch.
Mustafa: Agreed! Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. And good luck with building the next version of Gmail.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
Swiggy: Delivering Local Food Within 40 Minutes
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Founded in 2014, Swiggy started small, delivering food to a few neighborhoods in Bengaluru, India. As the company grew, the team wanted a mapping technology that could help expand the service throughout India.
Swiggy needed a scalable mapping platform that covered a wide geographic area and offered tools to help the company to build an efficient mobile app and website for customers and delivery staff.
Customers find restaurants and order from them using the Android app, iOS app, or the website. Swiggy worked with Google Maps Partner Media Agility and used a variety of Google Maps Platform APIs to develop web and mobile apps that incorporate relevant local restaurant details.
Google Maps Platform Results
- Built a hyper-local delivery service that is growing throughout India at a rate of 25 percent per month
- Deliveries are made quickly, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and retention—users have been so satisfied that nearly 80 percent of its orders are from repeat customers
- Drivers seamlessly handle tens of thousands of orders per day
In order to guarantee fast food delivery, Swiggy returns only restaurants within four to five kilometers of the customer’s location. The Directions API is used by drivers to easily route to restaurants and customers. The customer can track the progress of the delivery and estimated arrival time using a mobile app or the website.
“Google Maps provides the most accurate and reliable data, which is crucial for us because maps and location are central to our business. We also knew Google’s intuitive interface would provide a great customer experience with little to no learning curve… Google Maps’ ability to provide customer location and the distances of nearby restaurants is the backbone of our success, because it ensures a reliable, consistent customer experience,” said Aman Jain, Senior Product Manager, Swiggy.
Google Cloud’s Virtual Appointment Scheduling Tool (VAST) Helps State of Arizona Recover from Unemployment Situation
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When the world was forced to go primarily online, state governments also faced the reality of needing to provide community services without the health risk of meeting in person. Old systems that relied on interpersonal contact could not keep up. An unprecedented number of displaced workers swamped every unemployment system. The capacity challenges weren’t limited to state labor departments either. Everything from birth certificates and marriage licenses to apostilles and court system services that could usually be handled by a simple walk-in had to be scheduled in advance. Both internal and external communication suffered.
To meet these challenges, many organizations turned to new technology solutions and innovative approaches.
How VAST helped Arizona get back to work
The State of Arizona had tens of thousands of constituents who relied on pandemic unemployment insurance and would also need tools to reenter the workforce.Tim Tucker, Deputy Administrator of the Workforce Development Administration for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, started preparing in late 2020. He collaborated with Google Cloud and SADA to introduce the Virtual Appointment Scheduling Tool (VAST) to State of Arizona staff members. Using VAST reduced the excessive workload taken on by the Workforce Development Administration as they got Arizona back to work. VAST lets constituents book an appointment, upload documents and forms, and conduct career counseling virtually. This helped constituents move through the system faster so they could successfully reenter the workforce.
That preparation paid off. As of September 2021, Arizona had recovered the majority of the jobs lost during the pandemic. It has also seen one of the smallest percent change in employment compared with pre-pandemic numbers. Even more impressive, Arizona is one of only five states where unemployment claims are now lower than pre-pandemic numbers. Using VAST helped them get people back to work faster and has become a permanent part of their unemployment program.
Bringing streamlined services to the community
To fully realize a solution to the challenges faced by our public sector customers, we focused on three key areas in which we knew we needed VAST to excel:
- Efficient staff allocation
- Streamlined internal meetings
- Confident constituent interactions
We also knew our customers needed to get VAST online fast, and it needed to work with existing infrastructure without requiring a total overhaul. These areas informed the design of VAST’s features and have allowed us to meet the challenges faced by agencies such as the Arizona Department of Economic Security.
Virtual Agent support and integrations
VAST gives constituents 24×7 virtual agent support powered by Google Cloud’s contact center AI virtual agents. Virtual agents are custom programmed to fit the specific needs of each agency and community they serve. It’s easy to add new options and information whenever an update is needed. Virtual agents can be designed to understand the user’s intent and serve up relevant content for a smooth user experience on both ends of the system. Virtual agents run at scale and offer multi-language support, ensuring they can serve everyone in the community. By pairing these with VAST, constituents can experience seamless self-service.
6 week deployment time
Most of our public sector clients needed a solution yesterday. VAST can be deployed rapidly, taking about six weeks from start to finish, which includes everything–even staff training time.
Integration with Google Workspace and Chrome
VAST securely integrates with other Google solutions, such as Google Workspace and Chromebooks. We work to ensure VAST is fully functional within your existing systems.
Collaboration and support
SADA collaborates with each organization to ensure that the design, development, and functionality of VAST align with their needs. SADA specializes in helping public sector customers migrate to Google Cloud.
Analytics
Application administrators have access to analytic data gathered by VAST and options to customize and add additional datasets.This data helps organizations find blind spots in coverage, fix service bottlenecks, and better organize internal resources. Leveraging this data gives organizations the power to make changes, resulting in everything from a smoother customer experience to cost savings.
To learn more about how Google Cloud has supported Arizona during the pandemic, check out this blog on how their vaccination distribution system leveraged Google Cloud to get the vaccine to more people. For more information on how VAST can streamline a customer experience.
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The Simple Salesforce Extension on Gmail That Can Make Sales and Marketing More Productive
What’s one of the big problems of sales and marketing? The inability to get a more holistic picture of a customer when reaching out to them.
There’s a fix for that if you’re using Gmail.
It’s a Salesforce Lightning Chrome extension. As you read and respond to emails in your inbox Salesforce Lightning for Gmail will surface relevant customer information from your CRM directly to you within the Gmail interface.
This will not only save you time by reducing how often you’re toggling between tools, but it’ll also ensure that you have the most current customer information at hand at all times.
With Salesforce Lightning for Gmail you’ll be able to see opportunities, cases, leads and other Salesforce records the contact has with your organisation enabling you to better craft your email response to match your customer’s specific situation.
Find out how else Salesforce Lightning for Gmail can make you smarter, faster and more accurate. Watch this short video now.
How Google is Showing the Way to the Differently-abled: A Blind Program Manager’s Account
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What does “accessibility” mean to businesses? It’s not just about making sure that your office or retail space is accessible to workers and customers who have mobility challenges, it’s also about making sure that your apps, digital tools and content are also more accessible to everyone.
Our product teams work every day to ensure that tools like G Suite have built-in accessibility features. As a Program Manager, I help create those features and use many of them myself, as I’m blind. I would like to give an overview of product accessibility features that have been available for some time, as well as some new ones.
Listen to content with help from screen readers.
A screen reader is a helpful tool for people who are blind or have low vision. It provides methods to interact and control applications and also converts content on screen into spoken text. With a screen reader and keyboard shortcuts, you can read, edit, and comment on files. Getting started is easy: In Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets, go to the Tools menu, and in “Accessibility settings,” check the “Turn on screen reader support” box. Learn how to turn on screen reader support in Docs.
G Suite supports several screen readers, including ChromeVox, Google’s own screen reader. ChromeVox is automatically built into Chrome devices, like Chromebooks. You just have to enable it. There are many other screen readers you can use with G Suite too; this support guide explains which screen readers work best with which web browsers.
Another way to listen to content is with Select-to-speak, a feature that reads content aloud to you using text-to speech (TTS) to verbalize highlighted content. To try it out, highlight text and activate the select-to-speak button. An example of a select-to-speak tool is the one built into ChromeOS.
See a summary of changes to your documents.
To make it easier for people to keep track of collaborators’ contributions in Google Docs (without having to actively watch every single change), we recently added a feature called Live Edits. Helpful if you use a screen reader or magnification, Live Edits periodically summarizes changes made to a document by collaborators within the sidebar. Learn how to comment and collaborate in Docs using a screen reader.
And for people who are sensitive to visual crowding, we also introduced eight different Lexend font families that have varied widths and spacing to accommodate different reading speeds. Read more details about these font options.
Use voice typing to “write” by speaking.
Voice typing is a powerful productivity tool for everyone, including those who do not use a keyboard. It’s especially useful for people with low vision or with motor disabilities that may prevent them from using keyboards, mice or trackpads. When you speak into the computer’s microphone, voice typing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert your voice into text. In Docs, you can even use voice commands to select and edit text—for example, bolding words or cutting and pasting text.
Partnering with Google Cloud is the Key Behind Recent Healthcare Innovations
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It’s simply amazing to witness how some of our systems integrators employ Google Cloud solutions to drive innovation in ways we at Google may never have considered—especially in healthcare. According to analyst firm MarketsandMarkets, the market for the Cloud in healthcare is projected to grow 43% between 2020 and 2025 to nearly $65 billion, fueled by the need for better technology infrastructures and faster digital transformation.
Healthcare and life sciences communities are looking to Google Cloud and its Service engagement model partners to improve collaboration and activate the power of medical data. These transformations deliver robust data analytics and bring a much deeper perspective into health epidemics like COVID-19 to help save lives.
In the healthcare and life sciences industry, our Google Cloud partners and customers provide constant energy and inspiration–and are the magic in some key healthcare innovations globally.
Let me show you how they are solving real-world business challenges.
Improving collaboration in Healthcare
Cloudbakers and Comanche County Memorial Hospital transitioned 2,000 employees to Google Workspace to improve collaboration, reduce costs, and increase security. By implementing a system that requires less maintenance while enabling mobile access to data and true collaboration, Comanche County Memorial Hospital saves $175,000 annually on licenses and helps medical professionals spend more time with patients.
“We chose Google Workspace because it cost a quarter of what we were paying previously, offers the kind of modern features that healthcare facilities need, and gave us data security and peace of mind.” —James Wellman, CIO, Comanche County Memorial Hospital
Accessing previously locked down medical data
Google Cloud and Quantiphi supported advances in cloud-based machine learning services to reduce infrastructure costs, unlock new paths of treatment, and dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to evaluate scanned imagery following a stroke. John Hopkins University BIOS Division has been working on medical imaging to accelerate insights from scans on approximately 500 patients from 2,500 hours to 90 minutes, and lead to more accurate decision-making for brain injury patients that will ultimately improve medical outcomes.
“We’ve aligned closely with the goal of showing that a cloud-based, AI-driven approach is robust and that it can be performed while protecting personal PHI. In terms of costs, the cloud has definitely reduced some of the traditional financial demands of our research.” —Daniel F. Hanley, Jr., M.D., Director, Johns Hopkins University BIOS Division
Improving data access with the flexibility of Google Cloud
With the help of MediaAgility, TRIARQ migrated to Google Cloud to modernize their platform, build new applications, and expand their global footprint. With BigQuery, TRIARQ can now consolidate all transactional data, past and present, into a single location to report on specific insights and predict future data from e-prescriptions to complex revenue-cycle data and value-base analysis.
“The future of this industry will need to be a global one, and we can no longer be stuck in legacy systems if we want to survive. Having a team that is passionate about supporting us in this journey is definitely a plus point.”—Yaw Kwakye, Co-founder and Chief Architect, TRIARQ
Increasing visibility to COVID-19 outbreaks for actionable insights
As part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, HCA Healthcare chose to work with Google Cloud and SADA to create a national portal that increases visibility into outbreaks in 3,100 counties across the country in just 8 weeks. Now, the portal generates 30,000 new analytical views each day that can help inform private and public sector decision making for reopenings, closures, hot spots, and many other population health management activities.
“This project required deep knowledge of AI, and consumer-facing platforms, as well as healthcare. Google brought together the ideal combination of product, people, and partners. Google Cloud’s healthcare-specific products along with SADA’s expertise in the healthcare IT space made this partnership the perfect choice to move quickly and intelligently.”—Dr. Edmund Jackson, Chief Data Officer, HCA Healthcare
We’re committed to building the technology, resources, and services through Partner Advantage to help our partners address this opportunity. Looking for a solution focused partner in your region who has achieved Expertise and/or Specialization in your industry? Search our Global Partner Directory. Not yet a Google Cloud partner? Visit Partner Advantage and learn how to become one today!
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