In every email app before Hey, the emails you receive are in the Inbox tab. And the emails you send are in the Sent tab. Two separate containers for sent and receive mails is analogous to how physical mail works. But physical mail works that way because of it’s technological constraints. Constraints that electronic email doesn’t have to live within. Yet surprisingly for 20 years, E-Mail has always been designed analogous to the Physical Mail.

Instead of building by analogy, if you build with first principles, if you simply start with asking the base question, “How must a person A communicate with person B digitally?”, what you will inevitably end up with is the e-mail client & service by the makers of Basecamp, HEY.

And ofcourse, all the sent and received emails will end up in one single tab/container like it’s on every Direct Messaging app in the world.

In the next 10 minutes, we’ll (re)build HEY starting with that base question. A lot of this will peel off the impressions you have of e-mail based on your past experiences, and re-introduce email to you. At the end, it might feel like this is how e-mail was always supposed to be. Such is the implication of reasoning from first principles.

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//Let’s begin with a message, and an address.

How can a person A communicate with person B?

To send something to someone, one needs something that uniquely points to a person: An address. Anyone with your e-mail address can send you a message. And they don’t have to register themselves on the same platform as yours. Just like one doesn’t have to be registered to the same government as yours to send you a package.

Email exists on the open web. It’s not a closed system that has to adhere to the choices of a single ruler. It’s a technology any entity can use to send a piece of information to anyone. This is why E-Mail won’t die, even if it’s usage fluctuates. This is why it deserved the attention of people who made Hey. CEO, Jason Fried, had this to say:

“Now email feels like a chore, rather than a joy. Something you fall behind on. Something you clear out, not cherish. Rather than delight in it, you deal with it.
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And yet, email remains a wonder. Thanks to email, people across cultures, continents, countries, cities, and communities communicate every day. It’s reliable. It’s simple. It makes it easy for two humans to share their love, and for millions of people to earn a living.

So good news, the magic’s still there.”

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Anybody can send you an E-Mail. Now, who should?

Anybody can send you an E-Mail. Next question is who should. E-Mail when designed in the image of Physical Mail, allows everything sent to you land in the “Inbox”. This is how GMail works and then tries to solve the problem of filtering emails with AI.

But when designed from first principles, it goes:

A person wants to send you a message. Do you want to let him? Yes / No. This is the “Screener” built into Hey!

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/sidebar
Why screening by sender, and not individual e-mail?
Now, instead of screening by sender, one could think of screening every individual email before it arrives in your Inbox to be opened. The problem here is that you decide based on the external packaging (the Subject Line) to open an mail or not. Now subject lines can be misleading or click-bait, and your only option is to trust the sender. This is why Hey! has screening by sender. Not to mention, the option to screening individual emails is a lot of work, & probabilistic-ally unnecessary. 
/sidebar_end

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You screen when a sender sends you an email for the first time, and then they can send you emails forever, or never. Now where does it go?

Part 1: The "Where"

After the screener, you’ve received a message. Where does this message go? This should depend on what you want to do with the message.

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Once you’ve received a message, the first decision is:

1. To Save it? If yes, then
2. To Read it? If yes, then
3. To Act based on what you read?

Depending on the stage a message reaches, it gets collected into the 3 containers of Hey: ‘Paper Trial’, ‘The Feed’ and ‘Imbox’ respectively.

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‍//Save only.

Stage 1: Message received. Should it be saved?

There are no archives in Hey. Archives is for stuff you don’t need, but for some reason you don’t delete. Take the case for old messages in DM Apps which don’t go into an archive, but naturally get pushed down to the bottom of an infinite stack. That’s the rightful place for messages you don’t need, but don’t wanna delete either. There are no archives in DMs and there need not be archives in E-Mail.

Archives was another element borrowed from the physical world. But the physical world doesn’t have an infinite stack, digital world does. In Hey, everything is in an infinite stack. You either choose to keep something in the system, or delete.

Messages that you don’t need to read, etc., go into the Paper Trail.

Objectively, by first principles logic → “Messages that needs to be only saved (Reach the stage 1 and stop there.”)

Let’s contrast this with how the copywriters at HEY have described it as (subjectively): “This is a receipt, an order confirmation, or something transactional.”

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//Read only.

Stage 2: Message saved. Should it be read?

There are messages that you only need to read. You don’t necessarily need to interact with these emails like a forward or a reply. These are messages that go into the The Feed container of Hey!

First principles logic → Messages that needs to be saved & only read. (Message that reach stage 2 and stop there)”

The copywriters describe this set of emails as: “This is a newsletter or marketing email. It’s purely informational, I can read it whenever.”

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Stage 3: Message read. Should it be acted upon?

A message may demand a reply, be forwarded to someone else, or any action in the outside world. Emails that probably demand further actions goes into “Im-box”.

First principles logic → “Messages that needs to be acted upon.”

The copywriters describe these emails as: “This is from a person, it’s something I might reply to, or it’s something I absolutely want to see when it arrives.”

To be comprehensive here, these are not just emails to act upon, but also emails that needs to be immediately seen. Till now we’ve only talked about the space dimension of emails: “where does the email go in your world”. Now, we shall talk about the time dimension of these emails: “when does the email appear to you”.

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So far, we’ve talked about the actions on e-mails, now the question is “when”.

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Part 2: The "When"

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Notifications & the 3 Types of Information

On Hey, Imbox for emails that are important & need to be immediately. The moment you read “immediately seen”, you might think of notifications. But the immediacy referred to here is after you open the app. Notifications is a different type of information. Let me explain.

There are really 3 types of information:

• Information pushed to you
• Information you pull out
• Information you create

An information that buzzes your phone is information that attempts to “push” itself into your attention. Beeping notifications is information that is pushed to you. Opening the app is choosing to pull out information. Up until now, all emails are treated as information you pull out.

One does have the option to selectively turn on notifications for certain threads or contacts.

When there’s new email in the Im-box, the user must be informed. Before jumping to the level of “pushing” information at the user, there’s two things that can be done at the level of waiting for the user to pull out information.

One way is a Red Dot on the App icon. Just to indicate there’s something new. It’s all a user needs to know to decide to open the app. Check out this tweet from Jason Fried:

But iOS only allows number badges. The other is widgets but more on that near the end.

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‍//Fan Moment
Are you appreciating the attention to detail here? The makers of HEY really respect your attention, and have managed it sincerely. Along similar intention and logic, I have crafted a framework for designing a “sincere” notification system.

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When do you read, reply, forward or perform any action on/based-upon an email?

E-Mail, inherently by code, is an asynchronous form of communication. Push Notifications, or simply constant attention of the user have to be added to make it synchronous. The makers of Hey! understand that and keep all communication inside Hey or with the Hey-app asynchronous. No notifications by default! Hey doesn’t send you any notifications, until you explicitly turn on “Push Notifications” for certain E-Mail threads or contacts where you want to communicate synchronously.

There’s some deep Truth to communicating asynchronously. To reply, when the thought & the intent naturally arises. That’s why often when you reply later, you reply better.

Hey doubles down on asynchronous communication with "Reply Later" stack (more on this later). I must point out that Hey’s commitment to the default asynchronous communication is going to receive resistance from the typical behavior of “obligating the receiver to read or reply within your “assumed” expected time frame. This makes me smile.

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CEO, Jason Fried (continues) : 

“The magic’s still there. It’s just obscured — buried under a mess of bad habits and neglect. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email software.”

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The Private Note & Editable Subject Line

When you read an email, a thought arises. It may not include the intent to reply, but just a thought. The makers of Hey! have included a feature of a “Private Note” you can attach to an email.

This private note replaces the second line of the E-Mail Row on your feed. I like this, but first principles doesn’t fundamentally dictate such a use-case for the private note. It’s a nice to have, but maybe changed in future.

The idea of having something replace the second line of the E-Mail Row is a novel one. When an email arrives, the subject and the first line of the body describes the email to you. Hey gives you an option to change both of that for future purposes (like an ongoing thread, or searching for the email in future,etc.)

To solidify including this feature based on first principles, we have to dig deeper to question the nature of language itself.

Back before the first dictionary was ever printed, we didn’t have fixed spellings for words. All words with their meaning and their spelling were made up as it “felt” right. Awesome feels better than awful, even though semantically they must mean the opposite. Eventually, the spellings did start getting standardized with the printing press and the advent of dictionaries. Meaning is much more fluid and remains so.

Point is different people use different words & phrases to point at the same thing. If, say, I would have designed Hey, I would have probably come up with a different name than “Paper Trail”. This is most apparent across different cultures, but is also evident among people who grew up together. James Gleick, in his book Information Theory, explains:

“English is actually many different languages — as many, perhaps, as there are English speakers — each with different statistics (for using a word, phrase, sentence, etc.). “

I must recommend you to check out the book. It’s the book you read to look at the world from first principles for information forms the base layer of our universe. Let’s return to Hey!

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Hey! allows each individual to identify an email in their own words.

First principles logic describes it as → Different people use different words for the same thing.

The Copywriters describe these emails as: “If you don’t start the thread, you’re often stuck with other people’s generic, non-descriptive email subjects. With HEY, you can rename a subject so it makes sense for you without changing things for the other person.”

I am extraordinarily impressed that the makes of Hey! thought of including this feature. It’s probably the case they didn’t arrived at it with the thought process of first principles, but purely based on intuition.

This might be true for everything I mention here. You can simply follow your genuine intuition to think of features. First principles is simply a great way of understanding, justifying and materializing those ideas. Ideas based on personal observations when expressed in first principles allow for the same to be found in everyone’s subjective experiences. The feature has a better chance to be universally applicable to people.

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“Reply Later” & “Set Aside” stack.

Reply Later‍

When you read an email, a thought arises. It may include the intent of replying to it, but not immediately. In which case, you must add it to the reply stack. Batching similar tasks is Productivity 101. Hey has a Focus & Reply mode for just that. The makers of Hey would know this from their years of designing the project management tool Basecamp.

Set Aside (actually is, Read Later)

It is described by the copywriters as:
“Sometimes you get emails you need to reference later — travel info, handy links, numbers you need, etc. With HEY, you can ‘Set Aside’ any email in a neat little pile for easy access whenever you need it. At hand, but out of your face.”

These are simply emails that needs to be read in a near future by you, or by an airport agent, or a bar-code scanner. Set Aside is just the “read later” stack. If you think from first principles, there are two primary actions you perform in an email app: Read & Reply, each get a stack.

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Let’s quickly knock out other features

Now that you’re thinking in first principles, we can quickly build other nifty features of the app.

→ Speakeasy Code: There’s a screener in Hey to let someone’s message in. But what if you’ve already screened the person in the physical world. When you ask someone to mail you, you can give them the speak-easy code (a code-word) which when included in the subject line by-passes the screener.

→ Opt-ing out of Email Threads: This is simply the same question as Screen-er: “Do you want to recieve emails (of a thread)?”

→ Merging Threads: One fundamental argument is people like to organize differently. One may choose to maintain multiple threads, the other may choose a single thread. Organization is a subjective task. Another is simply fixing a supposed error from someone on the other side when they start multiple threads for the same conversation. The makers of Hey have only talked about the later.

→ Clipper & File Manager: So far, we’ve been surfacing relevant information to the user at the E-Mail level. But what about information within the emails itself? The Clipper allows the user to surface bits of information from a mail. HEY surfaces the attachments for you in an in-built File manager.

→ One Sender, One Row in your Imbox: This is not how Hey describes this feature, but this is essentially what’s happening. Someone is asking for your attention via email, and it arrives in your purview (feed). The fact that that person sends you multiple emails, doesn’t mean he should be allotted more rows, and hence, a bigger portion of your purview. He should get one slot to pitch for your attention like everybody else.

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Human Intelligence > AI

Communicating with humans is fundamentally a creative task. There’s no technology available today that can inherently mimic human creativity. Putting an AI at the helm to organize your emails is an inherently poor solution. Hey wants to put a human in charge. As described by the makers:

“You’re better at deciding where things go, what your intentions are, and how you want things set up. The machines have a lot of learning to do before they’ll be able to second-guess.”

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Some possible improvements

→ An E-Mail should exist simultaneously in both the stack and it’s original container: When you add an email to one of the stacks, it’s CUT-&-PASTEed to the stack, and when you’re done they land into the Imbox. If I say, ‘set aside’ a few newsletters to read later, it’ll be removed from “The Feed” and when marked ‘Done’ put into the “Imbox”. This choice as per my analysis here has no logical roots.

→ Sticky Notes is redundant to Private Notes: Private Notes are notes that replaces the second line of the E-Mail Row. Sticky Notes attach into a third line to the E-Mail Row. They describe it as something you add to your Imbox. But Private Notes can play the part. It kinda feels redundant, without a clear logical division on what to use when.

→ Indicator for “The Feed” : In the era of substack and newsletters exploding, “Hey” succeeding to collect them all in an unified feed for every user is a feat all by itself. It allows Hey to implement a “Feed” mode with expanded emails to create a social-media-esque feed. The problem is there’s no way to know if a new email has arrived in it until I open it.‍

→ Say Yes to Widgets: The above problem gets most ideally solved with widgets. About the only thing I am missing upon switching from G-Mail is a widget for the (Big 3) containers. Widget is still at the level of information you pull out. A widget allows at-a-glance info. and saves you a few taps along the way. The email widgets from G-Mail display the emails as you scroll to see if there’s anything worth checking out. But with Hey, if & when a new email requires your attention is signaled by virtue of which of the Big 3 Containers it arrives in. Hence, the ideal widget will simply be a dashboard showing the “system” status of your Hey, arranged by priority established above.

Here’s a rough design I put together:

The numbers indicate New E-Mails “unattended to”. This can be improved a lot. Though, this is a nice at-a-glance of what Hey is all about.

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Final Word

One must not think that this is how they came up with all these ideas. In fact, reading the manifesto and other material by the makers of Hey, you can clearly see the intuition that guided their product thinking. Intuition is always a great place to begin as it attempts to imbibe the philosophy one lives by.

When a variety of people bring their intuition to the table cultivated within their own subjective experiences, the job at hand is to find the objective Truth that is true in all of their contexts. This is what you build into a product, if you want it to be compatible with varied lives of people. This is where first principles thinking comes in.

Intuition alone can feel like an opinion. Casey Newton from The Verge called Hey “a wildly opinionated email client.” I vehemently disagree. The ideas in Hey are not one-team’s-opinion, but a falsifiable argument where-in you structure the ideas on an objective logic, basing on a premises of clear assumptions. It’s similar to the way they do physics. ‘Hey’, or at-least it’s ideas, is here to stay until the very physics of email communication changes.

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CEO, Jason Fried (finishes)

“Email deserves a dust off. A renovation. Modernized for the way we email today.
With HEY, we’ve done just that. It’s a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be.

HEY is our love letter to email, and we’re sending it to you on the Web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.”
(Link Here)

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PS. I’ve not talked about the Privacy choices made by HEY. It’s a broader topic which I want to separately study and write about. Please think about helping me out with the same.
PPS. Based on First Principles, I created a framework for designing a “sincere” Notification system.