Inbox by Gmail: How it stacks up

The Inbox by Gmail app (review) for Android and iOS mobile operating systems was released back in November 2014 which updated the traditionally email-focused Gmail experience to something much broader.

The approach with Inbox was to encompass more individual items so that reminders, diary items and other important details didn't slip through the cracks of being mentioned in an email and quickly forgotten until it was too late, past due or otherwise missed. Years in the making, it was an overhaul to how to think about working with email and how to get far more out of it.

How Inbox by Gmail Actually Works

Email essentially replaced work memos between members of staff. Remember those? You're showing your age if you do.

Bundles

Like type emails with attached receipts from purchases are bundled up together to make them easier to locate during tax time. Bank statements are similarly grouped together so they can be more easily reviewed. Change how emails are matches to that they logically go together by your own direction. Review them and then swipe them out of the way.

Highlighting

The Inbox by Gmail app attempts to pick up what the most important messages are and highlight them to the user within the app. This includes upcoming events in the calendar, flight itinerary and select images that have been picked up.

Both bundles and highlights are used together to provide the best and most current information to the user at any given time. Information in real-time at a glance. Whether the information was contained within an email or not, the app can pull in relevant information in addition to what was supplied with an e-ticket submission from an airline or photos sent over by a girlfriend with shots from the most recent camping trip.

Assists, Reminder and Snooze

Create, amend and work with reminders and To Do items in the way that suits you best. Add your own reminders into the Inbox and let the app remind you about items in your To Do list and how they relate to today's planned events.

The Assists feature is also useful because it pulls in extra bits of information to assist in the completion of the task in the To Do list. This can make the difference between being able to complete the task and needing to go off to perform more research first. Many To Do items are un-actionable because they require more research before they can be completed and the Assists feature helps with this problem. Inbox will add links to existing emails to add a check-in facility for the flight that has been booked or a map to a restaurant reservation.

How Are People Using Inbox by Gmail

Research over the past 3 months has shown Google how people are using the app to change the way the manage their email, their To Do list, and their digital and personal lives essentially.

We present an infographic outlining the findings for how the Inbox by Gmail service is actually being used:

(source: Gmail blog)

Android users were almost three times more likely to download the app and use it than iOS users. 70 percent of the user base is on the Android OS, whereas 28 percent are on the iPhone. There is also an overlap with web based users who 34 percent are also accessing via the web rather than the app itself.

Bundles as efficient ways to group tasks and items together are popular. Promotions draw 33 percent of the bundles for efficient discount hunting by consumers, 20 percent track various updates as a bundle, forum messages are bundled in 14 percent of cases whilst 13 percent of bundles were connected to other types of social activity. A full 85 percent of messages are now bundled in some way with 60 percent of users processing their bundles and sweeping them away twice a day.

Highlighting was popular too. Purchases and packaging tracking to destination was the most common use at 51 percent. Calendar invites is used by a third of highlights. Flight information formed 9 percent of the highlighting, reservations was 4 percent and event tickets just 2 percent.

Assists that provide extra information to users based on their email usage included top spots for locating a phone number, a web address, and a look-up based around a deadline of some kind.

Reminders also were heavily used, but so was the snooze options where over 40 percent of reminders were pushed back with the snooze feature. A quarter of users preferred to set custom times for their reminders, with most others using the today, tomorrow or next week options, with only a few sending the reminder to the Someday category that they may never get back to.

Clearly the Inbox by Gmail is an app worth trying.