Make Me Look Good

The capabilities of software and computing power these days is, well, immense. What does it take to make things simple for users (cutting out 90% of the features that only 10% of the “power users” need) or to observe their most common mistakes and create elegant error handling to catch mistakes for them?

I use GMail as both my primary personal email client and via Google Apps for all of Bet Smart Media’s email. I’m generally impressed with most of Google’s offerings (calendar aside- a post for another time!). Today was no exception. I finished typing up an email to a colleague and hit “send”. I got this nice notice from Google:

As it happened, I didn’t actually have an attachment that needed attachin’ for this email, but what a nice feature to have. Name me one person who hasn’t forgot, at least once, to add an attachment to an email going out to a large group of cc’d recipients after referencing it in the text! Why doesn’t all email software include this simple check for such a common mistake?

Good on ya Google! Sometimes it’s the little things…