Google has announced that it will be changing the interface of Gmail in order to make viewing your inbox an easier and more digestible task. The goal is to help manage the types of e-mails that users receive through a series of customizable tabs.
The redesign will be rolled out over the next couple weeks to users on desktops, Android and iOS. The video, which was released by Google to explain the change and is available below, begins by saying that "inboxes can be overwhelming."
"We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more. All of these emails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done. Sometimes it feels like our inboxes are controlling us, rather than the other way around," Google wrote on the Gmail blog. "But it doesn't have to be that way."
The redesign comes with five new tabs that users can organize their e-mails into including a social tab, for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ notifications; a Promotions tab, for online offers like sales and coupons; an updates tab, for bills and receipts and a primary tab, for interactions with friends, family and coworkers.
According to the Gmail blog, these tabs will be completely customizable in that you can turn off certain ones to the point where, if you don't like the new tab system at all, you can turn off all of the new tabs and go back to the original, or classic, style of Gmail.
As shown in the video below, the new features do not seem to be a drastic change to the design of Gmail but rather a new feature that will augment itself to help eliminate the clutter that the current single inbox stream has. The hope is that it will allow users to pay more attention to all the things that require their attention.
You can view the release video below:
