#android gmail

Through a family friend, I recently got a hold of a Motorola Atrix 4G to see for myself what a consumer might experience managing emails while on the go. I could speak volumes about the iOS environment, but I am now on a mission to earn a Droid cred.

Not surprisingly, tried-and-true email design best practices hold especially true for emails being viewed in the Gmail for Android app environment.

1. Subject Lines Matter:  Notice how much real estate is devoted to the subject line. It's at the very top in bold face.

2. The top-left quadrant = prime real estate: When half of the screen is taken up by the subject line, sender information and the ever-valuable 'show pictures' button, the top of your email is even more important.

3. Left-align your Preview Text: The most common thing to do is to center-align preview text and your 'view in browser' links.  Move it to the left.

4. Image/Text balance makes a difference: Text in the top left and a text link to your primary call-to-action need to be much higher up to save a busy person's thumb from doing the tap-hold-swipe action of scrolling left/down.

4a) Tangential <rant>: For the life of me, WHY ON EARTH ARE IMAGES OFF ANYMORE? It's as if the Gmail software developers don't trust the Postini (ahem, Google) firewall b/c spammers might identify my email address as being valid?  Ask me if I get more spam on my iPhone via my gmail account: answer = no. This Motorola Atrix 4G can handle the image downloads.  Maybe [ start the conspiracy-theory-tone-of-voice] that's why Verizon was making so much hay about phone calls being so clear on their 3G network b/c all the Droid phones they were selling didn't automatically load images. </rant>