Gmail Labels get drag and drop

Today when I logged in my google mail account a change alert greeted me. Google mail has kept improving its interface in 5 years since its inception, to add functionality or improve the user experience. This time it has introduced the Lable drag option. This feature lets you assign the lable to any and many messages in your mail box by simply dragging the lable onto the messages.




A very cool usability feature. When you are on your inbox or on a message screen you can drag a lable to assign that lable to the message(s) in question. From your inbox you can also drag message or multiple messages(press "Shift" Key while selecting, to select multiple messages) to assign a specific lable to these messages. But on assigning the lables this way (dragging message to the lable) will move your message from the inbox to the folder specific to your lable.



This functionality eases the task of assigning lables to your communications especially if you have a longish Labels list. Google also has thought the functionality well from usability perspective and moved the Lables above the chats widget. This means just drag and drop no Scrolling up and down for finding the lables (or communications) while dragging. Another thing that They have maintained is the Lables drop down. So when I am at the end of a loooooong mail, I can assign the lable to this mail the conventional way (from the drop down). Google sure knows the nerves of its users.

Google Announced Search Options Panel Launch

Last week I was browsing the groups I have joined on Linked in when I found a post regarding the launch of Google Search Options Panel. Being lil too stuck up with the one of the projects, I saved that link for future reference. Today I found sometime and so opened this link to find out what this Google Announced Search Options Panel is. The page opened with some compact data and a video of Marissa Mayer Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, explaining the functionality launched. It is a neat set of drill down tools introduced in the Google search. After seeing the video I thought to try the feature myself. I searched for "IPTV Service" clicked on show options. There I clicked on related search and with in 4 drill downs (and which were quite fast) I was actually in front of a search result page of my company's web site. Pretty Good!!! I am impressed.

So what is Google Search Options Panel? It is a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views of the results. Read more about it on Google's Official blog. The Search option panel gives you multiple options to drill down. These options are divided neatly by groups like Type of results (Videos, Forums, Reviews) , Recency (Recent results, Past 24 hours, Past week, Past year), Display option (Images from the page, More text) and drill down options (Related searches, Wonder wheel, Timeline).

While Videos will show all the videos (hosted on say You tube) matching the keywords (or key phrase) searched by you, you can also sea the results from the forums or the reviews only, posted on different forum or reviews sites respectively. But all this stuff depends on the site owner properly marking up pages. Web publishers will have to adopt microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML for Google to show reviews under reviews and forums under forums.


When you choose Related Search option, the related search keywords are displayed on top of the results of the search you have made. When you choose Wonder Wheel, a graphic (a Dial with multiple hands) with related linked search appear alongside your search results. Clicking these the related search links opens another such Dial linked with the existing one. Also the search results change according to the new search suggestion chosen. I'm not sure how useful this will be though. Timeline can be used to search results based on the time duration. It drills the results to a specific year and then to a specific month. This is a great option for the research purpose.

These features though promise good user experience but consumers can't readily use some. For instance, if a user to see results found in a discussion forum, or videos or reviews only the quality distinction will start appearing once the web masters start marking the pages accordingly. We will have to wait and watch how many web masters do it. When I search for "parking laws india" the related searches give me better options than wonder wheel. Now I am not sure which option will give me better results. May be little more experimenting will lead to better understanding. But it still is to be seen whether these tools will improve the quality of the information and reduce the time.