Did you attach that file?

17/09/2008

You know when you email someone and mention that you are attaching a file to the message but you actually forget to do so? Well, Gmail will alert you in those cases, just like in this picture:

This solution is so obvious, so easy to develop, and makes such a great difference that totally blows me up. THAT is design!

There are 10 comments in this article:

  1. 17/09/2008Ale Muñoz say:

    Nice.

    They copied this Mail.app plugin. I’ve been using it for some time and don’t have enough nice words for it. As a bonus, it works with a lot of languages simultaneously, which is cool if you write in english and spanish from the same account : )

  2. 17/09/2008Agustín Jiménez say:

    It reminds me the ability of Mail (OSX) for linking sentences describing a date with Calendar. :)

  3. 17/09/2008alberto say:

    Molando. Si cunde el ejemplo, más de uno va a tener que quitar de su firma lo de “Director adjunto”.

  4. 17/09/2008Pi say:

    If it works it will be a great improvement for the user experience. It might be very difficult for different languages and for vague expressions like “aquí tienes lo que me pediste” / “here you are”. If it works in those cases, then it would be like reading our minds :-)

    Muy bueno el comentario anterior. “Director adjunto” jajaja :-)

  5. 18/09/2008Julio Loayza say:

    There’s an old plug-in for Eudora, at least since 2002, based in the same idea.

    I’m not using it anymore, but it was configurable, so you could decide your own attachment reminder keywords. That could solve most of the cases, even like Pi’s examples.

    I can’t remember well, but I think signature was not parsed, so no problem for “directores adjuntos” :-)

  6. 24/09/2008Outsider say:

    Just to give a counterpoint,

    Ain’t we starting to go down a slippery track?

    I mean, this kind of pseudo-intelligent behaviour, when used in excess, is what we’ve all learned to hate from Microsoft Office –remember that hideous paperclip saying “It looks like you’re trying to write a letter”?

    You seem happy with the advantages of this kind of features, but keep in mind the disadvantages:

    - the annoyance of “false positives”: this thing might possibly be triggered by messages such as “You forgot to attach the file!”

    - Users might get used to the feature so they will learn to pay less attention to not forgetting attachments, thus becoming more vulnerable to “false negatives” in situations such as the one described by Pi.

    Myself, I’m not too fond of features that rely on natural language processing, except for batch processing of massive amounts of information (such as spam filtering). As I see it, simplicity and reliability must come together, i.e. simplicity gains must not be exchanged for reliability losses. One of the things I love about my hammer is that it never fails to hit things. It doesn’t turn out to unscrew things one in twenty times. If it would, that lack of reliability would add complexity to the task of using it.

  7. 25/09/2008Pi say:

    Outsider… your hammer never fails to hit things. Too right! Wouldn’t you like to have this message??

    “You are about to hit your thumb. Continue? Yes / No”

    :-P Just kidding.

    I agree that it can be annoying too, but it is true that almost once a week I receive an email saying “sorry, here’s the document”. So, as you can deactivate the paperclip in word if you don’t like it, you could have that option in Gmail as well. Then, users decide.

  8. 25/09/2008Outsider say:

    Right. What I mean is that, as interface designers, if we dare to enter the world of DWIM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM), we should do it with extreme caution. Computers are not too good yet at figuring out what we mean, and in the process, they can take away some of our control. On the other hand, from a systemic perspective, teaching computers to stop training us into doing things right is something that makes me see a warning light somewhere. One thing is to make tools fault-tolerant, and another is to make tools train us to be more faulty. This is all too real –last week I had to correct a report written by a colleague, and it had one or two typos in every paragraph. His excuse was: “I run the spellchecker!” Man, as if the computer’s spellchecker was a replacement for the obbligation of a professional to mind his ortography.

  9. 29/09/2008Outsider say:

    …and, just to make my point clearer, I mispell “obligation”. How lame of me! :-)

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