Is it possible to upgrade a communication tool that has existed for more than half a century? Or will the technology continue to be displaced by real-time messaging apps, relegated to becoming an automated storage bin for our confirmation emails and unread marketing newsletters?
This week, project management software provider Basecamp showed off its multimillion-dollar effort to re-invent email, a service called HEY. This isn’t the first high-profile attempt to re-invent email — but with some streamlining and some innovation, Basecamp has come up with a number of fresh innovations that are causing a lot of people to take a second look at this age-old Internet technology.
What’s New?
Basecamp has clearly put some thought into HEY’s interface — and ways to reduce clutter. For example, subject lines appears first, in bold letters, above the name of each sender, which is now the first part of the usual excerpt from the email’s first lines. It’s also possible to bundle all of a sender’s email together, so that sender still only gets one row in your inbox — and you can group related emails from more than one sender. It’s even possible to set an “Ignore” flag for an entire thread.
But more importantly, first-time senders will never appear in your inbox; instead, there’s a separate alert just above it where you have the option to approve (or not approve) them. “Screen emails like you screen calls,” reads the download page for the app’s Android version. And you can also approve them for lower levels of access — so, instead of appearing in your Inbox, they’re routed instead onto HEY’s dedicated page for receipts and confirmation emails, or to a page made from newsletters and marketing emails.
This is what’s really different about Hey’s interface: it spreads your email onto three newsfeed-like pages. Important email still appears when you check your “Imbox,” but newsletters and marketing emails are routed into a separate page in a Facebook-style column, where they’re displayed in the standard reverse chronological order. It’s because not all emails should be treated equally, HEY’s web page explains. “You don’t need to mark a newsletter, marketing email, or a shipment confirmation as read. In fact, most emails shouldn’t come with an obligation to read them, deal with them, or track their state. They’re just information, they aren’t conversations.”
A third page also offers a kind of lesser inbox called the Paper Trail for “things like receipts that you rarely need to read.”
HEY also offers a special feature, called “The speakeasy code,” that lets you give senders a code word that lets them bypass your screener and go directly into your inbox, by including the codeword in their subject line.
Even for new and important emails, there’s a “Read Together” option that opens them all up at once and displays them together in a single newsfeed-like page, one after the other, “like we’re used to reading pretty much anything else today in 2020, right?” commented Basecamp CEO Jason Fried in a presentation.
And there’s still an icon to the left with all the usual choices — Reply Later, Set Aside.
In the online tutorial, Fried also highlights another key difference: HEY doesn’t spew up a chronological list of every email you’ve received which includes emails you’ve already read, which he calls with disdain a “striping” of different kinds of emails — both read and unread. “It’s a total mess.” The Inbox page separates them into two sections — first “NEW FOR YOU” and then “PREVIOUSLY SEEN.”
This means that when all your emails new emails are read, Hey gives you the satisfaction of seeing what Fried describes as “a nice empty space.”
The company also tried to improve on the old kludge of marking an email as “Unread” so you’ll remember to reply to it later. Instead, there’s a “Reply Later” option on every email, which adds it to a virtual deck that can be pulled up from the bottom of the screen. And there’s also a second virtual pile for emails flagged as “Set Aside.” Selecting “Focus and Reply” pulls up another newsfeed-like page with the full text of every “Reply Later” email — along with a dedicated area to the right for typing that email’s reply. “Line ’em up, knock ’em down,” quips Hey’s web page.
Or you can fan out the list of “Reply Later” emails to select one individual email for answering…
Everything else has been streamlined down to just one menu (which Fried calls “the HEY menu.”) Above all its icons is a search window where typing in the name of a sender pulls up a special page showcasing what you’ve received from them — every email (including ones you’ve both been cc’d on), as well as every attachment. And HEY also offers a separate page showing every received file attachment. (They’re sorted by date, so the further down you scroll, the older the attachments get.) It’s also possible to filter the view by file type — images, PDFs, spreadsheets, documents — with additional filters for sender.
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