ActiveInbox: Make your Inbox your Donebox

Death to ‘Archive >’ Move Nexter?

It’s very clear from a lot of your feedback – and I readily agree – that we could improve the ‘Archive/Delete/etc. >’ buttons on the Horizontal Action Bar (aka HAB).

However, exactly what is wrong is hard to define. There are many different kinds of minor complaints thrown at it, which include:

It duplicates Gmail’s own crisply-clickable Archive button: a confusing waste of precious screen real estate.
The interaction of ‘dropdown on mouseover’ is fiddly, and it works better permanently in the right-hand sidebar (where the ads and People Viewer is).
The ‘Archive >’ button would work better being first on the HAB for easier access, before the Status buttons
There should be an option to change the default from ‘Archive’ (e.g. ‘Delete’).
The ‘<' and '>‘ arrows are confusing, and the user does not know what will happen.

The underlying message is that a fair % of ActiveInbox users do not use the button, and therefore it takes up too much room.

Taking a step back, what was the original intent?

It is part of the Inbox Zero flow: you work the HAB from left to right, adding a Status or Deadline, assigning to a Project or Context, and then clearing it out the inbox and moving to the next message. However:
- We don’t always need to defer it with a Status/Deadline, very often we just want to discard it, so the archive/delete should be the first thing on the HAB.
- When we’re working through non-inbox items (e.g. our Action list), there is no use for ‘Archive’. Just ‘Finish’ and ‘Next’ really matter.
It reduces procrastination, as the presence of the Move-Nexter arrow gives you the per-message choice to go back to the inbox, or keep progressing through the messages without interruption.

Some ideas for improvements to get us started:

Go for complete Keyboard Control, where you can apply a Status/Deadline/Project (using Enter to do just one action, and Tab to do the action and then do another one), then use the keyboard shortcut to ‘Archive and Move Next’. Drop the ‘Archive >’ dropdown from the HAB.
When you mouse over the regular Gmail Archive/Delete/Spam buttons, a hover appears with a button that lets you select to < or > and move on after selection. Drop the ‘Archive >’ dropdown from the HAB.
Introduce a new row that has a countdown timer and 3 options: Do It, Defer, Delete (and move next). Drop the ‘Archive >’ from the HAB. This might even be a new addon.
Reduce the size of the ‘Move-Nexter’, so it’s just an icon. When you mouse over it, it opens up all options (Archive/Delete/etc.).
- Make it possible to hold Shift when you click a Status, Deadline or Project, that automatically moves you to the next item. (Or even make this a full time option).
- Move the ‘Archive >’ to the right-hand sidebar (at the risk it might clash with People Viewer, Rapportive, etc.)
Just keep as is, but increase the clarity/clickability of the buttons with a design refresh.

What would you have done to the Move Nexter?

All thoughts and suggestions welcome – even if they’re off-list. I’d love to know how you use the Move Nexters, how you process your inbox (a story of your day is always useful), and what you’d do if the Move Nexters were removed?

http://www.facebook.com/mikeburke Mike Burke

Couple things on original intent:

“We don’t always need to defer it with a Status/Deadline, very often we just want to discard it, so the archive/delete should be the first thing on the HAB.” – Not really. Just because we often can skip the earlier steps on the HAB doesn’t mean the most intuitive UI would be to have Archive/Delete first (at least not on the HAB). You would then be forcing anyone who wants to add a status/deadline to first “jump over” the Archive/Delete button, work through the HAB left-to-right, then skip back to the far left side to hit the Archive/Delete button.

“When we’re working through non-inbox items (e.g. our Action list), there is no use for ‘Archive’. Just ‘Finish’ and ‘Next’ really matter.” - Can we just hide ‘Archive’ as an option on the nexter if the message isn’t in the inbox? I believe it’s already disabled.

Adding Shift as a modifier to kick to the next item sounds like a great idea.

From the suggestions above I think modifying the stock Gmail archive button (not sure just how yet!) sounds like the approach that is most intuitive without adding redundancy to the Gmail UI.
http://profiles.google.com/philip.bowman Philip Bowman

As with most things in AIB, I think you’ve got it about right as it is. I do find the button has a tendency to move around under certain circumstances (e.g. non-fullscreen window), so if you could move it to the left it would help when processing the “Everything Else” emails.

I would love Keyboard control as an optional extra.
mmerlin

I preferred it the “old” way from the start of the year, when we could have the Archive and Delete Nexter options 100% visible all the time.

I dont like the mouseover dropdown functionality, I preferred the original ability to have these buttons always visible.

I use Status/Deadline options way less than the Archive and Delete Nexters

Anonymous

I agree with mmerlin. It is probably the most useful button on the HAB for me, so it was very frustrating when it was broken the other week, and is also more time consuming than it needs to be to have to hover over it and move the mouse again to get to the action I want.

Also, the way that it’s context sensitive is neat (changing to Finish on items that have an action associated with them), but it takes me extra time just to move to the next email in my list if I decide to leave this one for later (ie click Next), and there is too much risk of me clicking Finish and accidentally removing the action from the current email.

For me, its location on the right of the bar (because it’s the last action in the categorising/sorting flow) and the fact that it can have the direction arrows is perfect, though it does feel like there’s a relatively long distance to travel to get to it, and it can get moved onto the row below if you apply a label with a name that is too long for the top row. Perhaps either it or the label & project dropdowns could move one row down (e.g. immediately below the action buttons) to minimise mouse movement.

http://www.facebook.com/ProjectBlake Blake Eitniear

I’m happy with how it is now, I use that button everytime (next or finish). I never use the archive button, however I archive every email on the way in by default.
Sean Killeen

This is hands-down one of my favorite features of AIB. While agree that its footprint might be smaller, I absolutely love the way it lets me work through my e-mails. And the arrows on the right-hand side come in very useful if I accidentally finish an item, because it takes me right back to it so I can re-label.Combining some theories, a potential option might be to Turn the bar from text into icons (if possible; I’m not sure about the limitations you face). I imagine a tiny “A>” Icon, a “D>” icon for delete, “F>” for finish, etc. These buttons could simply be enabled or disabled according to user preferences. Removes an extra click to mouse-over/drop down the menu as well. To enhance visibility, it might help to align the actions under different colors (maybe in the gmail color scheme) — F> is green, D> is red, etc. This will help users avoid clicking the wrong icon. All in all, I think it would take the same amount of real-estate, less screen clicks, and offer most customization. You could also use these icons to give a user preference: “display Archive & Delete icons before status button” could re-arrange their location.I think the positioning of the item makes sense on the right-hand side. Label/categorize and then click to go to the next item. Follows the intuitive process. People who want to just archive all their mail without categorizing might be missing what AIB is trying to accomplish.The idea of the arrows as a drop-down could also work, provided you also allow that on every button on the screen (i.e. status buttons). Sometimes I want to do that one action and then go next. In this way, it could be a helpful feature.I don’t like the idea of a new row, only because I don’t like the idea of losing screen real-estate unnecessarily (though I’m not sure how much it actually matters to me in practice)Overall, I love the product. A great piece of work!
http://twitter.com/sjkilleen Sean Killeen

This is hands-down one of my favorite features of AIB. While agree that its footprint might be smaller, I absolutely love the way it lets me work through my e-mails. And the arrows on the right-hand side come in very useful if I accidentally finish an item, because it takes me right back to it so I can re-label.

Combining some theories, a potential option might be to Turn the bar from text into icons (if possible; I’m not sure about the limitations you face). I imagine a tiny “A>” Icon, a “D>” icon for delete, “F>” for finish, etc. These buttons could simply be enabled or disabled according to user preferences. Removes an extra click to mouse-over/drop down the menu as well. To enhance visibility, it might help to align the actions under different colors (maybe in the gmail color scheme) — F> is green, D> is red, etc. This will help users avoid clicking the wrong icon. All in all, I think it would take the same amount of real-estate, less screen clicks, and offer most customization. You could also use these icons to give a user preference: “display Archive & Delete icons before status button” could re-arrange their location.I think the positioning of the item makes sense on the right-hand side. Label/categorize and then click to go to the next item. Follows the intuitive process. People who want to just archive all their mail without categorizing might be missing what AIB is trying to accomplish.The idea of the arrows as a drop-down could also work, provided you also allow that on every button on the screen (i.e. status buttons). Sometimes I want to do that one action and then go next. In this way, it could be a helpful feature.I don’t like the idea of a new row, only because I don’t like the idea of losing screen real-estate unnecessarily (though I’m not sure how much it actually matters to me in practice)Overall, I love the product. A great piece of work!
Shai D.

“Make it possible to hold Shift when you click a Status, Deadline or Project, that automatically moves you to the next item.” – sounds like a great idea. I don’t use move Nexter button.
Kevin Korslund

What makes the “Move-Nexter” arrows so powerful is how little interaction it takes to clean out the unwanted clutter from my inbox. The buttons stay the same place, so i can just place my mouse over the arrow and “click…click…click…”. All of the suggestions I’ve seen in the blog post would ruin that interaction:
- I don’t use keyboard shortcuts with GMail, so a keyboard-shortcut-only approach would be difficult for me
- Hover over GMail archive/delete requires moving the mouse between main button and arrow to make the hover appear, plus is visually distracting
- Reducing “Move-Nexter” to an icon introduces too many clicks/hovers.

My vote is for keeping it as-is. There is a bit of a learning curve but the buttons are very, very powerful. I do like the suggestion to put it at the left end of the bar though.

Brad Couper

Totally agree with Kevin – I think that these buttons are one of the key reasons for using AIB. I’m happy for them to have a spruce up if the need is there, but please don’t kill them off! With them in place as they are I power through my e-mails every day.

Kevin Korslund

[double-post, my bad]
John Nelson

Many of these issues would disappear with good keyboard control, as I have proposed in the past.

I am finding the new Gmail Labs “Preview pane” quite useful, with either horizontal or vertical pane; one can go up and down the conversation list using the typical unix vi editor keys (J down, K up), scroll inside the preview pane with spacebar and shift spacebar, delete with “#”, archive with “e” (or change any of these using the “Custom keyboard shortcuts” Labs module). The only issue is that the HAB isn’t visible in that mode, and AIB doesn’t scroll to see the bottom of the screen at the moment, so I need to make two passes (the first to get rid of all the conversations I don’t want to label, the second to do the usual GTD process with the HAB).

Rob

I will make comments regarding Move-Nexter separately, but please make preview pane integration a higher priority than redesigning Move-Nexter. Extensive suggestions were given in previous post regarding preview pane, but we have not heard back from you on what you decided to do there Andy.

http://twitter.com/arunkw Arun Kumar

@Andy:disqus 1st suggestion, when you write this kind of post, please instead of using bullet pts kindly use 1.A.V numbering system so that people can jump to the numbers directly and give improving comments.

I am a hardcore shortcut guy, all my mail processing is by shortcuts like a sniper.
shift+# for delete
y for archive
j for next mail
u back to the inbox.
I want HAB to have full shortcut capabilities for everything. (My humble request please please don’t go for building functionality thinking from point of view of mouse users on gmail)
Andreas Neustifter

(I have no time to read all comments so if I repeat something earlier said: sorry.)
I like the buttons, they make sorting and filing my mail very fast and easy, I think they can be improved tough:
*) The Finish button has not point being there: first there is a dedicated button and second its way too easy to hit by accident.
*) The Spam button is also not necessary, Gmails spam filters are so good that hardly any spam needs to be handled. (Was this not as good when AIB started?)
That leaves two buttons:
*) Archive should be the default in the Inbox and Next the default everywhere else.
(Come to think of it this could be handled with the regular Gmail button and auto-advance too. Hmmmm….)

I’m using AIB since January now and I honestly can not imagine a life without it so PLEASE keep up the good work! (And I do not say this lightly…)
Robert Holmes

Last week when this item failed I really missed it. My vote for keeping it as-is and I second Kevin Korslunds reasoning (keeping the mouse in one place while working through the clutter).

Personally I use:

Move/nexter
status action/waitingon/some day
assign to projects (projects that i work on) and references (administration (like invoices), to print, passwords)

I dont use:

Deadlines (tooooo many deadlines)
Notes (I could use these pixels on small screens since google uses a lot of pixs in the top of the screen)

Hey, and priority: in new gmail design the left pane doesn’t have scrollbars below the Google labels; so now I can not have the AIB panel open; have to collapse parts to get to the bottom.

So – for me: leave move/nexter as-is.
Mitch H

I just realized how HUGE shift-nexting could be for me. There are some things I put multiple labels on, some I just do a status, etc, and for those that have only one label I can get done in one click. It should be an archive-and-next when I’m dealing with my Inbox.

I hate clicking in general and live on keyboard shortcuts, but I’d be willing to click if it did enough….
Anonymous

Hi there! I never use the signs, I think I’m a little dyslexic and I never know which way to go, I don’t know if this confuses left handed people. Maybe N (next) P (previous) or something less ambiguous should be used intead of .

I have a lot of filters so usually everything is pre-classified, I would like to use the keyboard to be able to select a status and go to next email. For example

e - marks the email archives the email and goes to next email (for mails that are pre-labeled by a filter as a reference, for example bank emails or news emails).
a – marks the email as action archives it and goes to next email.
w - marks the email as waiting archives it and goes to next email.
s - marks the email as someday archives it and goes to next email.
I know this might not be for everyone but it’s just a thought.Complete Keyboard control would also be nice for when you are on a laptop.
Anonymous

I never use the move nexter. I just use the [ provided by Google.
Rob

I use Finish and delete of the Move-Nexter, but I seldom use the arrows associated with them. With Gmails new preview pane I would be inclined to use them even less, especially if I learn the keyboard shortcuts @google-84fb14f1cbd7784be97fd9ff7e398fb9:disqus documented. Thanks John!

As far as improving ease of setting status, deadline, project, context – yes a way to navigate and set via keyboard would be great. What about pinning common combinations (customizable) for one-click or shortcut to set all 4. For instance I use Waiting For / Start of Next Week / / frequently and have to set each one before clicking Archive.

One final thing thing Andy – when you do start messing with the Move-Nexter functionality please, please make it a preference which labels get cleared when ‘finishing’ an item. I still have to clear my context manually before finishing. (As you know, I use context for places and people associated with the email when it is a waiting for or delegated item)

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
Jochen Schuetze

Hi — let me throw in my $.02 here:
## The “>” in [Delete | ] really saves time because it does two things at once.
## Please make the whole matrix (Archive / Delete / …, all with “” PERMANENTLY visible on the screen, somewhere above or next to the conversation text. (cf. “…click…click…click…” )
## What was wrong with the right-hand sidebar..??? I really loved it…!!
## Shortcuts for everything are very powerful and key to speed. Display them in the “help balloons”, and consider making them configurable.
## Still, even with shortcuts, the “>” in [Delete | ] saves one step (the browser downloading the inbox overview before entering the next conversation) — so it’s still important to have it as such.
## sneak peek and preview panes may be part of another solution, but they still cannot replace the “>” part in [Delete | ]…!
Cheers, Jochen
Douglas Michael Massing

Keyboard control: always and everywhere.
Rhgaspar

but I am challenged with the fact that Horizontal Action Bar has disappeared completely in my version …. 4.0.2.22 so what is with that?? it’s frustrating that the behavior seems to change almost weekly and I did not update any software ? Great application but not sure I am getting what I paid for … anyone else see the same thing?

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