Mail Zero Email Desktop Client

The modern online entrepreneur needs an email client that is fast, efficient and a little less formal. Busy people would rather text than email and would appreciate something that would automate emails in some way so as to spend less time on email. This is the goal of Mail Zero: a desktop email client.

Project source

The brief was derived from the Dribbble Product Design course. User and market research data were provided and the ask was to come up with a wireframe prototype of the product, based on the goal and features outlined below.

Project goal

Design an experience for the user that:

• Makes email conversational.

• Less formal.

• Automates basic functions and reduces redundant tasks so as to increase a user’s productivity by reducing time spent on emails to an hour a day.

From the business perspective, ensure adoption of this tool by:

• Increasing productivity for users by reclaiming hours of their days, weeks and years.

• Eliminating wastage of precious hours in the day sending clunky formal emails.

Features of focus

• Threaded chat style email view

• Canned responses – predetermined responses to common questions.

• AI driven suggestive text – auto suggestions as you type a response.

• Smart folders and filters – for better mail organization.

My role

• Designing the user flows and wireframes

• High fidelity design and prototyping

Version 2

Made a few adjustments based on some good feedback from my course mentor.

User flow

The user flow focused on viewing and responding to emails.

Wireframe

I then translated the flow into a wireframe to see how the layout would look like and pointed out how the pain points highlighted in the project goals and features section were solved.

High fidelity screens

Once I designed the wireframes, I moved to high fidelity phase. Here I used the library provided of colors and typefaces to bring the wireframes to life.

The takeaway

It was a good opportunity to design beyond the mobile app by tackling the challenge of designing for larger screens. With larger screens you have a lot more space and a lot more to show but the catch is it must be well organized and relevant.

It was also a chance to find ways of making my design process more efficient beyond components and library styles. So for this project, majority of the copy came from using Chat GPT. The reason for this was to bring out realism to the project which is something that lacks when we use lorem ipsum dummy text.

Next steps

On to the next one.