If you had asked me yesterday what I thought was the biggest problem in any Google application, I would have told you that it's sending mail from different email addresses through Gmail.  Gmail let you send email from any address that you could receive mail to, but it always sent it from your main address "on behalf of" the secondary one.

This was unnacceptable.  My personal email address is runfromthebear which isn't very professional.  I can't have that attached to all my professional emails.  The result was that I had five different Google Apps accounts and I had to log into all of them to send mail.

Well, Google just fixed that.  You can now enter SMTP info for the additional accounts so that emails are sent through the proper outgoing server.  This removes the need for the "on behalf of" crap.

This was on my list of top 10 things that should have been fixed five years ago that almost made me lose faith in the big G.  Well, loving software can be an emotional rollercoaster, but I rode out the storm and now everything's gravy.

Next on my list is the main Google Docs page.  That thing is broken beyond belief.  Let's see some progress Google.  Also, I talk about Google too much so I'll try to cut back a little.  Sorry about that.

On Tuesday I talked about how I don't like modal dialogs.  Here's one way to avoid using them when designing an application.

I learned this one from Gmail, but there are other applications out there doing the same type of thing. Imagine if someone accidentally clicks the "delete" button in your application.  The results could be disastrous.  That's why most websites pop up a window saying "are you sure?"

The problem is, most of the time the use wasn't clicking the delete button by accident.  Most of the time the user actually wants to delete something and it's annoying having to deal with the confirm dialog.

With most important decisions, gmail just goes ahead and performs the action.  Then they pop up an unobtrusive message at the top of the page allowing the user to undo the action.  This makes sure that accidental clicks don't result in catastrophe but the user isn't inconvenienced in situations where they're doing everything correctly.

Sounds simple enough, but it's far from standard practice.  Sometimes it's not necessary to go through the effort of undoing things, but other times it can be a huge time saver.  If you remove enough minor inconveniences, you'll end up with great user interface.

I'm trying to incorporate not only this specific strategy at work, but any design ideas that follow the same line of thought.  For example, we will be redesigning one of our sign-up processes soon and I've already figured out one way to make it much easier.  Rather than showing the user every single option they can customize during signup, I think we'll just show the basics and then the advanced users can go in later and make changes that the majority of our users don't want to deal with.

Once again, this is an obvious idea which makes it all the more important to implement.

Microsoft is generating some buzz for their new search engine, Bing.  This inspired all kinds of blog posts discussing whether Bing is better than Google.  My opinion makes me feel embarassingly out of touch.

I just don't get what either search engine can do to make my experience much better.  They both seem perfectly capable of getting me the answers I'm looking for.  I can't remember the last time I wanted to find something on Google and I had to look past the first page.

I'm not saying that search can't improve.  I think that ten years from now search will be a million times better than it is now.  I just can't imagine how.

When DVDs first came out I didn't get what the big deal was.  VHS looked just fine and rewinding isn't that big of a deal.  Obviously I was being an idiot, but I kind of feel the same way with search.  At least this time I realize I'm being too complacent.

So what do you think?  Assuming we're all currently pretty good at finding things on Google, what will be some of the major improvements in search over the next decade or two?

You may have seen the news that Google is releasing a new communication tool called Google Wave.  I'm not going to talk about what I think about the product itself because it's impossible to have an opinion without being able to use it.  I want to talk about their goal.

The most interesting part of Wave is the way they claim to have formulated the idea.  They claim that this is how email would work if it were designed today instead of 40 years ago.  I'm not sure if they accomplished that goal, but I like the way they're thinking.

This is a great way to come up with really innovative new creations.  When you're trying to brainstorm new ideas, it's natural to take the approach that new ideas require solving new problems and creating new products.  Google Wave is proof that creativity can thrive even when addressing solved problems.

This is similar to how Zane Benefits works.  We spent a while trying to implement HRAs (Health Reimbursement Arrangements) in a way that was consistent with the existing health benefits industry.  We ended up constantly struggling with the inherently irrational and broken rules of the existing system.  Now, anytime we need to create a new product, we try to imagine how things should work rather than how things do work.  Sometimes we're forced to play nice with existing health care plans.  Sometimes we have the chance to re-invent the entire industry which is really exciting.

So let's brainstorm a few other things that should be re-invented like email and health benefits.  I'll give a few, but feel free to comment if you think of something I don't.

Sports

Strategy in sports is often based on how the game was played in the past.  Football in particular seems to offer a million different possible strategies and almost none of them have ever been tried.  Why not use two quarterbacks at the same time?  Why not go for it on 4th down almost every time (it works in madden)?

Banking

It seems really weird to me that with all the technology we have, I still have to keep some of my money in a checking account and some in a savings account.  Why can't I write checks from a savings account?  As it is now, I can transfer money from one account to another instantly so I always keep money in savings and transfer it to checking immediately before making a payment.  It's a pointless formality.  This is one of many ways in which the banking industry is still acting like they're storing everything in a physical vault.

Twitter

Twitter is stupid.  I would re-invent it by never inventing it in the first place.

How the Internet Works

I'm no expert when it comes to networking and transfer protocols and all that, but in a general sense, the internet was invented before anyone knew what it would turn into.  From the way information is transferred to the languages used to describe web sites (html, css, javascript, etc), the entire thing could use some improvement.  The creators of the internet had no idea what they were creating so it seems obvious that we could do a better job now.

Internet/TV/Phone Service

This is obvious, but I'll say it anyway.  Why in the world do we think of a TV signal as something different than an internet connection?  Why do we pay for data, text messages and minutes on our phones?  It's all just a bunch of ones and zeros, so how about some company actually charges for and provides these services with the realization that they're all the same thing (I know that the answer is because they couldn't charge as much).

Ok, so I'm not particularly proud of any of these examples.  I guess I feel fine with that because if I could think of a field that should truly be re-invented, I should be working in that field.  That seems to be how great companies are born.  Even still, what do you guys think?  What are some things that are based on tradition but could become something much better?

Last summer, I was a part of a team of five people (two ZB employees, three consultants) that spent more than a day migrating our hosted email to Mailtrust (a Rackspace company).  The migration cost thousands of dollars, the product was terrible, and it wasted tons of my time.

This evening I spent about two hours migrating to Google Apps for email, calendar, contacts and documents.  I did it entirely by myself, it cost nothing, and so far everything is about a thousand times better than the old system.

I hate to sound like a fanboy, but if Google offers a product, there's no point in looking elsewhere.