Gmail: Designed to be joyfully simple
I really enjoyed this conversation between early Gmail designers Elizabeth Laraki and Kevin Fox.
Fox on the joy of confidence:
[..] You know how to use something — it’s frictionless in how the user interacts with it. The user doesn’t have to think about how to use the tool and instead their reflexes do the work, and the UI gets out of the way. But at the same time it has a visual setting that puts them at ease, and it helps them down the path when they’re doing something novel they haven’t done before, so they hit the right thing without having to work hard to figure it out. That makes for a joyful experience.
When I received my Gmail invite more than twenty(!) years ago it was clear that it wasn’t just a improvement on webmail but a truly groundbreaking product.
It’s remarkable how many of the user interface paradigms pioneered by Gmail have become industry standards today.