AOL May Have Invented Email’s Next UI Paradigm

 Bill Wetherell, a senior director of UX design at AOL, is struggling to find a recent message from his wife in his Gmail inbox. He’s mashing and mashing and mashing on the down-arrow key while squinting at his laptop screen. Wetherell eventually finds the right email, but not before admitting his true feelings for Google’s popular messaging product. "It’s a frickin’ mess right now," he says. "I just want to find that frickin’ email, but I have to go all the way down here--wait, wait, there it is--way down here. This is basically the inbox fatigue we’re all now dealing with."

The exercise is not without a purpose: Wetherell is in New York to show me the true innovations of AOL Alto, a new service that the company promises will revolutionize how we interact with email, which goes live today as an invite-only beta program. As Wetherell describes, email has largely gone unchanged in years. Yes, there have been improvements--in search, contacts, storage size--but they’ve been incremental at best, and based on an outmoded architecture of lists, folders, and more lists. Alto is a radical rethinking of inbox design, and features a stripped-down interface that’s spruced up by visual cues and intuitive navigation tools. "Lists are horrible at revealing the treasures of your inbox, and folders are failing people," Wetherell says. "We took all the pixels that were dedicated to that space and just said, 'Screw that.'"