Threadsy
Today I got my hands on Threadsy, a web application that pulls all your emails into one seamless stream of information. It goes further by of course allowing you to view tweets from your Twitter stream, Facebook wallposts, etc. It’s a great idea and personally I’m greatly interested because I have Gmail open 24/7. As I’m using Threadsy I’m obviously observing the UI which has some great cues for designers. Here are my thoughts.
First and foremost I love the interface, it’s clean and anything but overwhelming. It does a great job at organizing the content of your email. The first outstanding element is the use of icons which are great indicators of content type. For example an email coming in from linkedin.com is marked with their icon (or logo). E-mails from friends are tagged with avatars as well. All this use of imagery and icons makes scanning your email stream quite easy.
Threadsy
One of the things I took away from this interface is the rollover icons. Deleting an email in Threadsy is 5x easier than in Gmail because in that application I have to select, move towards the top and click delete. With Threadsy little icons appear on rollover that you would simply click to perform a function. Case in point, I mouse-over an e-mail, click the delete icon (trash bin) and there goes the message. I tried doing this over at DesignersCouch in the critique for design. It didn’t work because members always asked “Where do I reply?”. The flaw in this lies in 2 things:
1. No one is accustomed to mousing over a comment and they wouldn’t think of it because it’s not a link. In Threadsy’s case email titles are links so mouse-over is required and in doing, so the user sees the icons. Once users learn that mousing over will show additional functions to make life easier, you will be mousing over everything to see the options. This goes a long way for Threadsy in the tweet section.
Threadsy also did something smart. Tweets aren’t links, right? So the above logic doesn’t work. What designers at Threadsy did was show a Twitter icon on the right of tweets that indicates there’s something to click. When the user mouses over it the icon disappears showing the functional icons like RT, Fave and @ symbol.
2. In my attempt to keep things subtle in my designs I use subdued colours that blend the icons a little too much into the background. Threadsy, on the other hand, uses a popping orange hue that you cannot miss. The downside is that after awhile you try to avoid mousing-over things because the icons always appearing gets annoying. But perhaps that’s nothing to complain about.
Threadsy
Considering Threadsy is trying to do what Gmail does but better I believe threaded emails is a must. They reduce the overload of email and keeps things organized. This to me is a huge drawback because I’d like to see my ongoing conversation in one place. When Google Wave comes out it will make Threadsy look primitive in terms of functionality because they’re still treating emails in a standard fashion.
Let me not forget to mention that it allows you to use Gtalk as well. That’s a great addition but it isn’t useful for chatting. If someone replies my browser doesn’t animate the title showing reply like Gtalk does via web. As a result there’s no way for me to look at the Threadsy tab and know if someone replied or not.
Page title for my Threadsy right now says ‘860 unread – threadsy’. I would prefer something more personal like ‘Depthskins – Inbox (860).
All in all Threadsy is a great application with a lovely interface and serves a great purpose, but several drawbacks in its functionality exist and may hinder users from returning.
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Martin
