Label-dependencies with Google Mail

Google Mail (GMail) offers the feature to nest a new label (Google-Gmail-speak for "tag") under another one. You get there following this path:

Gmail > Mail settings > Labels > "Create new label" > "Nest Label under:"	  

With this feature, you can define a label sports and nest another label volleyball under it. Then you get sports and sports/volleyball respectively.

Unfortunately Google has mixed two different concepts which results in bad usability: wrong behavior expectance.

When you are thinking of the concept of labels or tags, you probably get the following idea: whenever I label anything with sports/volleyball, I expect to see those items (emails) also in sports since volleyball is a refinement of sports.

When you are prefer to think of folders, you will get the expectance to find things stored in sports/volleyball only there.

Consider following situation:

• labeled with sports → My sports plan.txt
• labeled with sports/volleyball → Beachvolleyball schedule.txt

This is, what you see in Gmail interface with current implementation →

• contained in sports → My sports plan.txt
• contained in sports/volleyball → Beachvolleyball schedule.txt

This is, what you might expect from a label point of view →

• contained in sports → My sports plan.txt and Beachvolleyball schedule.txt
• contained in sports/volleyball → Beachvolleyball schedule.txt

The same situation visualized in tables:

Therefore, although Beachvolleyball schedule.txt has some connection to the sports label (via its sports/volleyball label), it is not shown when accessing the sports items.

Google tried to combine both worlds as they stated in a very interesting whitepaper. They designed the web interface of Gmail to satisfy people from the "folder-world" and people from the "label-world". This works pretty good so far. Until they start to break the metapher for the "label-world-people" by introducing hierarchical structures.

The logical concept of hierarchies with folders differs from the logical concept of hierarchies withing labels. Different folders always mean different contents. But labels that are super-labels of other labels mean the combined set of items labeled with all sub-labels and the super-label.

Another example of how hierarchical structures conflict with modern information handling.

Note: this blog entry was originally authored using Serendipity and converted to Org-mode format for publicvoit via a dumb script. This may result in bad format or even lost content. Please write a comment if you want to get in touch with me so that I can try to fix things.