Crapping All Over the Email Client
Many tech entrepreneurs seem convinced that people live in email. This is certainly true to the extent that much of our correspondence, contacts, and activities are captured within email products. It is our true work beast of burden and where we spend an exorbitant amount of our working time.
Why not take the app to the email client then? The hypothesis is since that is where people are doing the most work, build the app inside and around the email client itself. Therefore instead of something completely separate and passing back and forth between the two applications, everything the user needs is conveniently in one, single place.
While I can understand the appeal of doing stuff in the email client, it is huge mistake. Email itself is not a natural way of working and there is little flow or reason to the process. If anything, email is a massive productivity drain on companies and people. Should we not be focusing on getting people out of email as quickly as possible, instead of trapping them even further in the morass of electronic messages?
I have used a number of these apps so far and I can tell you they all pretty much suck. Most of the tools are CRM based things to manage contacts, opportunities, service requests and the like. A few others are trying to do HR administration and project management, but I imagine there are other applications also getting the royal email treatment. Regardless of the application however, the end result is a tool that takes over the interface and makes what was mildly hellish into an outright shitshow straight from the gates of Hades.
In a day and age where developers are creating elegant user experiences into even the most humdrum of apps, this should be a crime. Email is ugly and an app on top of email is ugly beaten with a baseball bat times 1000. The whole thing is just unwieldy and confusing. There are buttons and links and non-intuitive pop-outs galore. Then the things that you were used to are totally missing, thus requiring a mad search to find how to do what was previously a pretty simple procedure. Things just take longer with more clicks and not intuitive in the least.
Here is a suggestion to tech startup founders, stop crapping up email with your apps. Unless your app is specifically geared towards making email more productive for email’s sake, fight the urge to “appify” the email client. Plug into email on the backend, make that seamless and integrated and intelligent. Just leave email alone, it does not need your innovation.
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