Google's Gmail Redesign Is Part of a Larger Company Push

You may have noticed some significant changes to Gmail in recent weeks, including new colors, redesigned menus and navigation tools, and a new paradigm for connecting with other Google services inside your inbox.

At first sight, it may seem to be a simple redesign, but with over a billion users apparently devoted to Google's email network, even little pixel shifts or button rearrangements may have huge ramifications for engagement and market share. The revamp is part of what product manager Neena Kamath characterized as a drive toward a "unified Gmail," an effort to streamline how customers switch between online applications.

Gmail Redesign Is Part of a Bigger Plan

The new version of Gmail, which is being released to the public in stages, incorporates Google's developing design language, which is meant to provide consistency in visual schemes and interaction elements across the company's many programs, from Android to ChromeOS.

That effectively means Gmail's margins are rounder, it has more interactive overlays, and its classic white and red tones have been changed with softer blues in your inbox. According to several critics, this looked to be a data-driven reskinning rather than a fundamental rethinking of the email system. While Google has a history of A/B testing designs to death, the new Gmail seems more contemporary, smoother—and a lot like Microsoft Corp.'s competitor Outlook.

Google has made the makeover optional and placed its most important UI change in a settings option, perhaps to avoid upsetting users with too many changes at once. This feature enables you to choose which Google applications are available inside Gmail, such as Google Chat and Google's Meet videoconferencing service. The buttons are shown in a new vertical bar to the left of the regular email menu links for writing messages, large file transfers, examining drafts, and so on, much like tiny Gmail applications.

One might envision Gmail adding alternatives for a range of Google services such as Docs, Drive, and Sheets in the future, similar to Microsoft's rival web email client, which has buttons for Word, Excel, and online files, all inside a similarly positioned menu inside Outlook.

For veterans of Google's long line of defunct products and brands—Buzz, Wave, Google+, G Suite, to name a few—this new "unified" Gmail may seem to be more of the same, marking yet another attempt by the firm to condense various services into some coherent collection. After all, Gmail is the default home screen for millions, if not billions, of people.

Some of this disarray is ultimately cleaned up by browsers like as Chrome and Apple Inc.'s Safari, as well as native applications for mobile and desktop devices. However, for services such as Gmail, the issue is how many applications they can really unite before the interface becomes overwhelming.

A representative claims in a blog post about the new Gmail that the team tried to find the right balance between Gmail as "a standalone email application or a hub for easily moving between" Google services, noting that common user behavior during the pandemic has been a mix of email, chatting, video calls, and collaboration.

That is, for the time being, the default micro applications within Gmail will be Google Chat, Google Meet, which has since merged with another video service called Google Duo, and Google Spaces, formerly known as Rooms. Let's hope Google's email software doesn't rename Gmail in the future generation.