A little over four months have gone by since Google launched Gmail Labs, and the company is now revisiting its collection of 13 experiments. Or, to be more accurate, adding to it, with three new features.
This isn’t quite the fast and furious pace at which we were led to believe experiments would be released; thanks to a process involving “[n]o design reviews, no product analysis, and to be honest, not that much testing,” it seemed that things should get tossed out much more often.
Custom Label Colors
Still, the new experiments are at least interesting. Look for artistic types and the MySpace crowd to take advantage of custom label colors, for example. This adds a palette option to the standard 24 choices. The ability to drag and drop parts of the navigation bar represents another degree of personalization.
Then, as explained by Keith Coleman on the Official Gmail Blog, users “[n]ever have to click on a label again. Instead, enable keyboard shortcuts and press ‘g’ then ‘l’ to display the ‘Go to label’ pop-up. Start typing, and your labels will be filtered as you go. You can use the arrow keys to select a label and hit ‘Enter’ to select one.”
Gmail engineers are still looking for feedback, so feel free to provide it if any of these seem like extraordinary hits or misses to you. Maybe you’ll see a response before Christmas.
