Hey, question everything
Email has been around for a long time, and is a fundamental protocol of the web. So many companies have tried to reinvent it or build new features into mail that may have improved aspects of the experience for some users.
Features such as snoozing, smart inboxes, mail routing, have become fairly commonplace. But to me they all seem like power user features that just add to the complexity of an otherwise simple, but overwhelmed system. Business models have also been sketchy, trading personal data for free access - something increasing of concern.
Email has grown to become something most people despise and even distrust. There are penalties to letting your inbox get out of control, so we feel we must maintain it in order to maintain control - a hopeless task to some, and wantless for others.
And so I was delighted to hear that the talented folks at Basecamp were rethinking email with a new product called Hey. Their early mission statements were about privacy and control, and now they’ve released a Beta which they have demoed publicly in a screencast. I have thoughts, and wanted to write them down…
What they appear to have done is rethink email from the ground up. Keeping the fundamental of the protocol unchanged (of course - otherwise it wouldn’t be cross-compatible), but reconsider everything we know about email from a users perspective.
A guiding principal for designing Hey seems to be “Workflows not work arounds”, which I absolutely love.
Good product design is about really understanding the problem and thinking about the challenges a user might face. With something well established that everyone uses, like email, it can be hard to think outside the box as our preconceived ideas of what email is are ingrained from decades of daily use.
Basecamp ignored all precedence and accepted conventions, reframing the design challenge to be focussed on users needs today. They questioned everything, and at first glance the outcome is super-promising.
They clearly understood the problem, the underlying technology, the constraints, and the user needs - combined with critical thinking and good design usually leads to a great product.
They also did not make too many assumptions about user behaviour. With something like email, everyone has a personal approach, and so flexibility is important, and they’ve accounted for that. Hey does not try to be too clever with machine learning, or automatically doing something on your behalf. Every decision is intentional and made by the user, so they know how the system is behaving at all times and why - I love this and prefer to give users choice and control wherever possible.
It’s for this they should be most applauded. For following good product design principals, and hopefully coming to a solution that people love to use.
Some of the opinions I’ve seen shared in the design community are about specific style decisions. Frankly I don’t have much time for these comments - its a beta, it will change, and I’ll use a great app regardless of minor style choices. New products often start more opinionated and become more homogeneous over time. Product launch is the ideal time to be experimental and see what sticks, sometimes your only opportunity (unless there’s a large overhaul later down the line). I applaud them again for being distinct and having an opinion - something we are sadly lacking in most product design today.
Personally I can’t wait to get my invite and play with this in person. I salute Basecamp for taking on a big challenge and approaching the problem the right way 👏.
A few observations from key features:
Stacks
Piles of cards that purposefully get in your way. If they build up too high they are actually obtrusive, and so encourage you to deal with them rather than grow out of control. You can deal with items one-by-one, or you can view the stack as a feed and run through them in a single session - like clearing through a to-do list when you have time available to do so. This gives the user the power to manage their to-dos in email in an efficient and easily manageable way. The CTA label is to ‘focus and reply’, which is descriptive, but very opinionated. I think a simple ‘open stack’ link would do the job. It will be interesting to see how these translate to mobile.
Feeds
Theres a lot of them. You can view all mail as a feed, you can view stacks as feeds, all comms from a contact, and probably several more. Not all mail needs a replay and feeds are a great way to browse lots of content at once and triage. Way more efficient than clicking through emails one by one.
Massive purple action sheets
I love the in-your-face brashness that forces your attention to the actions. Super opinionated design, but very practical UX. However I’m not convinced getting to these action sheets is particularly discoverable - you click the avatar?
Main navigation
Another purple action sheet. It’s only accessible via the ‘Hey’ icon in the top-middle, and the only real indication this is interactive is due to a small chevron. I’d argue this is not very discoverable, and I suspect usage of this area will be lower than expected.
Keyboard shortcuts
It appears as if all actions are accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Clearly aimed at power users, but made clear and visible for everyone, everywhere, making learning as you go a breeze.
Misc
The Imbox (important box). Quirky and some might say tacky Americanism, but cute. Having a personality like this is totally on brand for Basecamp. I love it for all the reasons it makes me uncomfortable.
The UI is clean and well laid out. There are plenty of delightful interactions and animations that help reinforce the spacial model. The use of space and visual metaphors is outstanding to draw attention to things in the right way when a user needs it.
The privacy issues of email they address are major win. Personally I think all mail clients should take a leaf out of Heys book on this and give users control of what data they allow to be shared from tracking pixels I marketing emails. It’s a shameful blot on the industry this has been allowed to go on as long as it has. I am surprised Apple has yet to make this a thing for Apple mail.
I’d really like to see the on-boarding experience. No one knows your new email, so I suspect it’s populated with placeholder content that trains you. I hope they enable the use of this as a client with an email of your own domain allowing you to switch an existing private inbox over to Hey. The experience of moving all your email to this new system is the biggest barrier to entry that they have yet to address. You can forward mail in and out, but that’s messy. I imagine this the most unsolvable technical constraint they faced.
Its a beta, I’m sure they’ll learn a tonne from early usage and everyone should fully expect the product to evolve and adapt once observations are made from real world usage at scale. There’s a lot of features here for a version 1, and they built all this in two years while maintaining their existing product. An impressive start, and I’m excited to see where it goes.