I’ve found a few features that I feel don’t have quite enough educational moments to easily understand.
- Smart labels: apply automatically: There’s no onboarding step describing smart labels, so it’s not immediately obvious what they are when you first start using the app. When I first saw this setting, I had no idea what this would do. I disabled it, thinking that it would create new Gmail labels and apply them to new messages. I now know that’s not the case, but more education around this might help.
- Smart labels vs. regular labels: Continuing from above, the difference between labels and smart labels wasn’t immediately obvious. I wonder if overloading the “label” terminology for smart labels exacerbates the onboarding confusion? Personally, when I hear “label” I equate this to a Gmail label. “Category” could potentially also work here?
- Big Mail Online: After creating an account, it’s not clear what data is tied to the account. The “delete account” button has a blurb about data being irreversibly lost, but it’s not clear what data would be lost, and whether it would delete any of my actual email data.
- Show Top Contacts: I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to hide this row until I randomly toggled this setting to see what it would do. Either adding the visibility option to the context menu on long press of the row, or adding a visualization to the pinned preview within the smart box settings would help discoverability.
