Visual design is clean.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the wonky desktop design pattern of "sliding" right or left on an element to then - activate/ utilize another control. Even on a laptop with a trackpad, the movement feels inefficient and clumsy.

Makes sense for interaction on mobile devices. Seems silly on desktop devices given the human computer interaction.

One long comment on the nature of email itself here.

I believe email is having an existential crisis.

Yes, I know the email marketers will say otherwise, and the business results email generates is hard to argue with, but - remember, email has a locked in “Home Thumb Advantage” on many of our mobile devices.

It’s there, we check it out of boredom.

I do indeed use email, but nowhere near as much as I used to.

In my design business, I view most email based communication with customers to be a failure in the process. Project communications landing in email get lost in the sauce with email notifications from X number of apps barking at us. Spam from every other Saas and their brothers and sisters trying to “provide value” in our emails. Thus, we use Slack + Invision - and we usually set up a new Slack team with customers to centralize all communications there, as it’s more direct and harder to “get lost” in the email inbox.

The business communications that do end up in my email inbox tend to be opportunities. So, I do pay attention to those emails. “Hey, would you like to take a call to discuss a project”.

Maybe the emails exchanged are - “did you receive our proposal” - “did you get the invoice”.

Otherwise, the emails tend to be longer form communications. I’m speaking at an event next week in Singapore and the customer, their PR firm and myself have a long chain of emails coordinating the details for the event.

That makes sense for email, and tracking down details in those emails for say - flights, hotels, and so on, can be taxing.

But, as I scan my inbox here - I don’t see much else.

In terms of customers, business prospects and our communications, the passive water cooler style banter, bonding, “checking in” - even that is happening in a stitched together digital framework of apps from Viber, What’sApp, WeChat, Line, Skype chat, LinkedIn (barf), Facebook Messenger, you name it - I could care less. I’m mostly agnostic on these things, except for LinkedIn. It’s too ugly and junky, I will move conversations out of there. lol - For the others, wherever, whenever.

In terms of communicating with my friends;

Email is dead.

I can’t remember the last time I have used email to communicate back and forth with a friend.