The demo video of HEY is out. What do you think?
We've been chatting about Hey.com, a premium email by Basecamp crew, in a separate thread on IndieHackers but I have to say that it really looks amazing!
What's your feedback on what you've seen so far? Any concerns?
I will definitely take it for a test drive for a year.
Here's the link to a 37 min demo :) https://youtu.be/UCeYTysLyGI
Oh my gosh... I hate it. The UI is a nightmare. The workflow is obnoxious.
I'm a designer, a minimalist, a productivity nerd, and I love new shiny things that shake up the "norm" people are used to. But this thing looks awful. I don't see it succeeding.
I don't understand how it's solving the problems it says it's solving. In Gmail you can add filters for emails to block them or label them. What feature does it offer that is not present in Gmail for example? That you can see if an email is a first-time sender? It looks just like overly-simplified UI for a basic email client.
Somehow they've overly simplified while at the same time overly complicating. 😂
lol goes to show how differently people can view things. I love the UX. :)
What UX? ;)
:troll:
I am like totally the opposite :)
Can you be more specific? What UI element would you improve and for what benefit?
I could probably go on for a while about this... I'll try to be brief...
## Typography
For starters, I'm a stickler for Typography best practices. What immediately strikes me about the primary view is that the lines of text is way too wide. There are plenty of studies about Optimal Characters Per Line out there and it astonishes me when UI designers ignore them.
It could probably be argued that the primary reason for Optimal Characters Per Line is to prevent people from losing their place when their eyes are going from the end of one line to the start of the next line. And in this case, Subject and body preview are only single lines of text, and easily distinguishable. It's still visually unappealing--the amount of work I have to do to read from one side of the screen to the other is irritating.
## Colors
The color palette has potential, but far from cohesive. The luminosity of the purple, teal, and blue clash (rather than compliment) the text color choices (black and gray). It's just poor color combination. The black could probably work alongside the brighter colors, but the gray really ruins it.
The design also seems to treat color as a decoration rather than a utility. There are aspects where it seems like the color is a visual queue to classify actions or sections... but then it is used as a divider line, drawing attention to something that should be dispersing attention.
And finally, there are just too many colors at play, making the whole UI confusing and seems like a lot of work to learn.
## Buttons
The construction of square buttons with center aligned icon + label looks odd. And then they place alternate icons in the corners (left or right aligned) which throws off the balance entirely. At least without the corner icons the box button is balanced (albeit still odd looking).
## Iconography
I can see how some might like it, but I just don't. Feels too child-like cartoony. This is mostly personal preference. However, iconography, like typography, gives personality. That iconography reminds me too much of Comic Sans, and therefore gives off a cheap adolescent vibe that just doesn't work for me.
And just now I went back and looked again... it's really only ONE icon that is giving me that vibe--the thumb icons. Looking at all the others throughout the interface, they're (mostly) fine... except for the fact that it looks like there are multiple icon sets being used which makes it all feel disconnected and "quilted" together.
I said I'd be brief, so I'll leave it there. lol - we designers can get pretty passionate about this stuff.
Hey @dustinwstout, I just wanted to say your reply contains great information. Just made me go to my design and find lots of things I can improve, thank you! Also sovisual is a great idea, we will sign up as users once we are ready.
Thanks! Glad to help!
Thanks, Dustin for sharing this:
To be clear--they clash because of the way color theory works, not because it's a "modern" palette. The interplay of colors was the point. They're just poorly paired colors. It's like in fashion when a stylist tells you "those colors don't go together."
I muted the word 'hey' on Twitter for 30 days. It might be good might be bad, but way too much attention is being paid to it right now. :)
I just want to keep shipping.
How do you do this? There have been way too many tweets about hey and I honestly just want my Twitter feed to return to normal.
https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords
Enter the keyword then hit save.
Good luck!
:))
Honestly, Jason and DHH are great guys. Their product marketing capability is something I wish we all as Indie markers had (at least the majority).
Hey is too complicated. All said and done, if Gmail is currently working well for us to get our job done and grow our product, that's more than enough. Unless you are building a military grade product, with confidential emails, Hey wouldn't really matter.
I'm all for protecting privacy, but making a monumental shift to Hey! and waiting for other apps to provide a way to integrate Hey into their own platform, is going to take years I believe. If I am wrong, I will learn a lesson. If not, my reality check is correct.
In regards to the timeline, I think you are quite right... hence the innovators and early adopters on the bell curve...
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I tend to disagree that most IHs fall into 'that part of the bell curve'. It depends on the product. Some people in this thread mentioned that they are not power-users and are happy with their free Gmail. I have 10 inboxes; 5 get at least 100s of emails daily. I have at least 4 workarounds to help cope with that amount of emails.
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Because I am an "indiehacker" doesn't mean that I can be called an early adopter or innovator in marketing terms (by the book Crossing The Chasm) that depends on the product for some products I am for others I am not :) if you read my comment carefully that's what I wrote :)
i saw it...! and i commented and shared this in my private community:
so, yah.
Fair enough... it's a bell curve. They don't need you or me. They just need innovators and early adopters. Think of the first iPhone. Who would want a phone without a keyboard? Doesn't make sense... well...
i think they'll do just fine... this is a good move for them. smart!
BHAG man — https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/big-hairy-audacious-goal-bhag.asp
lol. i haven't heard that in... wait, i heard it this morning.
Some features of it are intriguing. I love the screener feature. The UI isn't really my liking. I know Basecamp crew loves doing simple designs like that, but there's a reason all email clients are rows... It makes sense.
The other thing that turns me off currently is that it's an actual email service and not a client. The people they're trying to target are people with massively busy inboxes... They already have well established email addresses, switching to foo@hey.com is not a viable option. I know they're working on your own email, but I'd rather HEY have been a client with an optional hey.com branded email you could easily use, sorta like icloud.com/me.com for Apple.
I'd rather Readdle build some of these features into Spark than use HEY. But I applaud them and wish them well. $99/yr is a steal for this service if it fits you.
thanks for adding your POV Josh!
I am on the fence. I feel that there is an exclusive club for the first people allowed behind the red velvet rope. They said they were letting people in based on their order on which they submitted their "request for invitation" when they opened that a few months back.
I added my name to the list pretty much within hours of them opening it up. However, the only people I seem to see bragging about their hey.com address are the people with huge Twitter followers - those perceived to be the 'movers and shakers' in the internet world I guess. Guys like Ryan Hoover, Jason Calacanis, April Dunford, Josh Pigford and others. No disrespect to them, but I hardly think people that busy would have been waiting to pounce on the invite list within minutes of it opening up.
I have a feeling they purely got their invites early based on their 'influencer' score based on the subjects they tweet and their audience size. A fair marketing tactic, but I think a bit disingenuous when they it is "first in, best dressed" when it appears to be more on "who you know". All the good email handles are going to be taken by the social media elites, and the rest of us will be left fighting over the scraps, methinks.
"I feel that there is an exclusive club" = for sure
Closed it when he said "Imbox"
:) well, IMHO, then you don't waste nearly enough time inside your inbox, and you are probably not the right target group. I don't know why that is such a big deal. They can call it the **** they want if they save time that I'd usually spend in my inboxes. If they can save me 30-min a day. 99/year is nothing and it already makes sense.
Great idea but I will never leave Gmail (Gsuite) for some random (YES we're talking in the big scheme of things!!!) company who will never be able to compete with Google's size and influence!
They were better off building a CLIENT that proxies Gmail into some private cloud - then it would make sense to offer a 99$ a year plan!
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I personally feel like email, like banking, is something that is "hard" to get right. I have a few accounts with "new banks" but they're not as good as traditional banking:
So what's the point?
A lot of tools start out great, then turn crap, and die off.
Others get really good and then get acquired.
Others stay good forever.
But my email, especially my personal one, will not be one thing I would trade for a 'test' out and hope it sticks around long enough!
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Well the thread asked -
what do you think..." so I gave you my opinion :)
I don't understand the obsession with Notion, what's the one thing that Notion does so much better than Google docs?
Thunderbird has been always amazing, I'm glad you still use it! If I had a client (not web-based) I would probably use it too!
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I stand corrected. They're a total random company when compared to Google!
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Honestly too many negative comments here. I forwarded all my gmail accounts to hey in minutes and I love the workflow. Will not
be looking back 😎
Sure the copy is cheesy - don’t like it? Don’t use it lol
I tend to agree with you Colin. I truly don't understand the fuzz around 5 letters word. :)
I can't say I'm all that impressed by it. Granted, I didn't know this was something the Basecamp folks were working on till today, so there isn't any hype factor for me, but I just didn't see much differentiation in most of their features compared to Gmail.
The one main thing I like is the screener feature. I think that's a fantastic way to manage newsletter signups, etc. and keep everything in check. At the same time, I could see that being problematic if transactional and marketing emails are sent from the same address. For example, if an online store sent a newsletter and the @hey.com user selected to have it screened, they may not receive receipts and shipment tracking information. It could also result in missed important updates, such as security alerts. This could be solved if the store used different email addresses for each notification channel, but let's be honest, most smaller sites aren't going to even think of doing that.
The rest of the interface seems to be reinventing Gmail's tabs features. It's not a bad idea, but it's not different enough to make me want to switch.
With Gmail, I also use a number of plugins, Streak especially. I don't see those coming over to Hey anytime soon and I would sorely miss those features.
Finally, I just don't like the principle of removing all tracking information and showing a banner like it's on the same level of a phishing attack. I get that some people aren't fans of tracking, but email tracking is much more innocuous than typical advertising tracking and it's a legitimate value to individual marketers as they run their campaigns.
With all that said, I like the interface and appreciate the idea. The folks at Basecamp create some great products (though they are all too opinioned for me to actually embrace them) and very solid leadership. I'm interested in taking a look in a year to see where it's at.
I'm going to try it out, but I suspect that it won't work for me because it's so opinionated about not having a way to archive anything. There's a huge difference between an email you've read and you're done with vs. an email you've read and need to keep around. I know they have a way to handle that (move it into one of those stacks at the bottom), but it seems so weird to me that the non-important emails show all the time in your inbox (I just can't bring myself to call it an "imbox"), but the ones you actually need to act on are buried in a stack at the bottom. I just don't see the utility in keeping old worthless emails around in your inbox. It takes the same number of clicks/keystrokes to archive something as it does to return to your inbox, so it's not saving any time. I just don't get it.
But I love the fact that someone is trying to make a new email product. The world needs more competition in this space, so I hope they succeed, and I'll give it a shot even though I'm not optimistic.
they've minimized number of steps for many tasks that you could do potentially with other clients and I like it. But it's not worth arguing with the people about that. It reminds me when google killed inbox and people were trying to explain me that I can have "same experience" in gmail. Yeah, I've used gmail, that's why I went to Inbox.
I would like to use it since some of the functions resonates with what I've been doing but the price is too high.
I actually don't like what they are trying with hey. They want to stop open and click tracking in general, which is wrong in my opinion. Of course people don't want to get tracked on every step, but what about services that only track open and click rates, but don't identify who clicked on what.
I love Basecamp, I use it for my work and DHH and Jason are great guys but I am not bought into this idea. Maybe I am a bit biased because I am working on an Email Marketing SaaS tho.
I don't get it. I can already do all those things in Gmail (see unread first in inbox, have filters for who to receive emails from, label emails, put them in different folders, get data from multiple email addresses, etc.). Is hey just a dumbed down UI client compared to other more complex email clients?
I'm mad because I know that I won't get nicolas@hey.com
But for real, I don't want to speak too soon, I'll try my 2 weeks free and then I'll be able to judge. I don't mind the UI so far.
haha you might get it you never know ;)
It's not even the $99/mo, the friction of switching to a new email address or setting up forwarding and a new set of apps is why I don't think I will be using this.
I wanted to love it, but it just doesn't seem compelling enough.
I came away from it thinking something more along the lines of "someone should just add a few of these features to Gmail".
Too bad the ecosystem for extending Gmail has high barriers to entry, and it's a ton of work to add features to mobile email.
I think that the cost of switching is something that is a real threat to Hey from a product-marketing perspective. BUT if they aim at innovators and power users in the beginning they'll have enough cash to dominate broader audiences over time don't you think? It's a long-term game. Gmail / Chrome weren't market leaders when they came out.
For some reason watching the video makes it feel really busy and complicated. Would have to experience it to really know... Though. it also looks like they took too much UX from basecamp, which personally, I'm not a fan of (too many clicks to do things).
Kudos on trying to "fix" email. Hopefully, this encourages other services to fix their experience as well. ✉️
Yes - it features basecamp elements. Not sure if I like that. But I am in love with the workflow.
Looks cool! Can't imagine paying $8/mo for the service, though, so gmail it is!
I love the idea of separate streams of important people vs general feed, and the Needs Reply.
I'm imagining some clones popping up quickly haha. I already thought "Hmm, how hard would it be to build these features on top of an existing account?" Like use gmail pop/smtp to get the UI (minus the added privacy features, of course).
In general, the ideas are simple, but probably took a lot of time to imagine!
How about the proxying of all images and the removal of tracking pixels? That looks hard from a scaling standpoint... For the rest, I agree
Agreed. They do a great job of coming up with super simple UIs that are also powerful. Proxying images and removing tracking pixels is simple(-ish), but definitely introduces scaling issues :)
Man I really hope people aren't thinking I'm going to try to clone it - it was just a little thinking out loud haha
That’s what a cloner would say 🤔
adding it to my list of projects 🤣
Clone? You ignore the strong branding of Jason Fried and dhh. Who can copy the branding?
There will be clones but users will probably stick with Basecamp guys. Just pay $2 more dollar per month. One can join the cool Hey club
If anyone has a Hey invitation code, please send me one. It looks fun to try it now.
I agree :) Any successful saas/app will be cloned, but that's rarely a recipe for success - you just can't compete if you're copying instead of having a vision.
Interesting reasoning. I have 5 inboxes that I actively use and I have my workarounds to cope with over 100 emails per inbox (GSuite). My first reaction was $99/year is nothing (and I still mean it wholeheartedly).
Well - it took them 2-3 years to build it.
To copy features probably not that hard. But to build security, functionality, and trust that the basecamp crew brings it takes 10+ years.
By copying you're not challenging them. They are yet to enter the market. You are challenging Gmail. Do you have the capacity to challenge a giant?
Questions for debate :)
No way, I don't plan on building that haha. It's just as a developer, my thoughts tend to wander towards "what's involved with this?" But I'm sure there will be copiers!
I respect a lot about the Basecamp guys, in addition to their take on software itself. I also love the features, just not worth it to me (not nearly enough e-mail to think about it).
Fair enough :) ya it makes sense that they are targeting power users, to begin with..
Imbox = Inbox - Things that aren't spam but I'm going to call spam anyway.
Designed to print money with vanity email addresses.
I think I love it.
But, I have an existing system to deal with all the problems HEY is solving.
My existing system is definitely less efficient than HEY, but I don't have to think about my system. It's habit now.
The high switching costs of HEY make it (seemingly) impossible for me to seriously consider it. But, I appreciate the workflows / use cases they are solving for.
I really liked the video and I am surprised by the negative comments 🤔.
What I really liked was :
I would have tried it if I could afford the price 😅but will be watching the product closely!
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Totally agree. Another example of him completely undermining a point he made earlier is when he explains that in Gmail there are so many different places to check (inbox, all mail, sent mail, etc.) but in Hey there's just the Imbox. But then you learn there's the reply later section, the pinned section, the screener, the feed, and the receipts section.
And yeah, I cringed a bit when he hyped up how there's just the one menu at the top middle, but then he later uses a different menu at the top right. Like, it's fine to have two menus, but don't prime me to think that multiple menus is a sign of bad design, because then when I realize that Hey has two menus, I'm going to think it's bad design.
I also think it looks like an interesting product and I intend to try it, but the marketing really rubs me the wrong way. It's going to be very hard to live up to the hype.
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Hey is so revolutionary it has no inbox!
Well, that is the most IMportant piece - "you are in control!"
The first thing I thought when I saw "imbox" is that it wouldn't be all that tough to create a script to replace any instances of "imbox" with "inbox". It would drive me insane seeing that all the time!
roflol 😂
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ditto! 🤣