Introduction

My friend recently made a mistake in Gmail where I told him to cc me on the email he was sending to someone. Instead of cc'ing me, however, he pasted my email address in the subject line and sent it off before realizing what had happened. My initial reaction to all this was: "How??" But when he walked me through his process when drafting the email, I began to understand how the mistake was made.

When drafting a new email, it's very clear where the recipients and subject should be entered. The user can also choose to cc or bcc recipients by clicking the respective text on the right.

However, by the time the user is typing in the body section of the email, it's suddenly a little less clear who the primary recipient is and who is being cc'd, as well as which line is the email subject.

Once the user clicks out of the recipient field, all of the recipients, both primary and cc'd, are condensed into the same line. Additionally, any empty cc or bcc fields are automatically removed.

For a user who sends emails regularly, this isn't a problem because they are already familiar with this automatic formatting. For someone like my friend who sends emails once in a blue moon, this can be the difference between sending a professional email and making an embarrassing blunder that might result in the email never getting read.

Solution

After laughing with my friend about it for a bit, I thought about some interface adjustments I could make to help future users like him avoid making the same mistake.

• Keeping the section labels for each field even after content is entered allows users to easily double check to see if they are typing in the right field.
• Separating the recipient types by category instead of grouping them all in one line helps users identify who they cc'd and bcc'd.
• Increasing the font weight of the subject text to match the header of the composition tab helps it stand out more from the neighboring body text.
• Having persistent fields for cc and bcc when added helps prevents users from accidentally pasting an email into the wrong field after clicking away and making the intended field disappear.

Before

After

Conclusion

This project was primarily an exercise in replicating and redesigning UI elements. As a result, I kept the scope small and avoided making major changes that would impact the user flow of composing and sending an email.

By no means am I saying that my design is better or more efficient than the current design, but I do believe my version would have prevented my friend from making that mistake in the first place.