Founders at Work.pdf

Paul Buchheit 165
of messages are in my email now—but it’s not a problem. They don’t get in the
way. They’re just there, and if ever I want to find that message from four years
ago where someone made some funny comment about Gmail that is ironic at
this point, then I can go back and find it. I guess the third reason was that
there’s something in the email that the person’s really nervous about and they
just want to get rid of it. But that’s pretty uncommon. So we said, “You want to
provide the ability to delete things, but ordinarily it isn’t really necessary,
because most of the reasons are actually just consequences of limitations elsewhere.”
Livingston: What else were brand new features that the world hadn’t seen?
Buchheit: Conversation view was new—when you click on a conversation and
you get all of the messages as cards instead of separate emails.
Livingston: Was that your idea?
Buchheit: This was a consequence of a few things. One is that I’d worked on
Groups, where we had done some of the same threading. Second was the fact
that we have so much email internally.
We’d have these conversations where someone sends out an email and then
four different people reply to the same thing, and some of them would be like
five hours later and you’d think, “This has been covered five times already and
you keep responding.”
It turned out part of the reason people were organizing their mail so aggressively
is because they were trying to put the conversations back together.
They’d put them all in the same folder—or they would forget and put them in
the wrong folder and then the conversation would get split and they could
never find the reply to this message.
There were all these little tools and tricks that people had for reassembling
the conversations. Why not just put them all together to start with? At some
point, we said, “Let’s hide the quoted text too.” Because that way you can just
read it much faster without having to read the same content over and over. We
were also looking forward to integrating chat/IM. We didn’t have time to
include chat in the original launch, but it was in the early prototypes because
we very much wanted to integrate chat and email—they belong together. So
one thing we did was to think about email from a chat perspective, as though
we were adding email to chat instead of the other way around. Of course chat is
very much conversation-oriented—nobody thinks about individual chat messages.
So the conversation view also came out of that—for a while we even formatted
the email to look more like a chat conversation.
Livingston: It sounds like you really took the user’s perspective when you
designed Gmail.
Buchheit: Absolutely, that’s very much how it developed. Every time we would
get irritated by some little problem, or one of the users would say, “I have this
problem, it isn’t working for me,” we’d just spend time thinking about it, looking
at what the underlying problems are and how we can come up with solutions
to make it better for them.