In the course of brainstorming about a product, I've been forced to check out my Gmail Promotions tab.<p>I normally avoid it as I find it too noisy -- filled with repeat emails from brands that I don't care about. It feels like too much work personally to unsubscribe from all irrelevant senders. And yet, while browsing it, I did notice a lot of latent value in relevant deals and discounts.<p>Would any UX changes unlock value from this tab? Some that come to mind include:<p>1) Better UI to declare which brands I care about.<p>2) Order messages based on promotional value rather than date received (admittedly weird for the email context)<p>3) User controls for how many messages received per brand per time interval.<p>4) Option to automatically unsubscribe if user does not respond to N messages from a given brand.<p>5) Rules to filter out deals / discounts that do not clear a specified threshold (i.e. save at least $20).
I went though a phase when I was happy to get a daily email from Best Buy and frequently saw an offer I liked, also I was a fan of <i>Ars Technica</i>’s <i>Dealmaster</i>, but about a year before the pandemic both of these seemed to go downhill (Amazon Fire Tables are on sale… again. XBox Gold is on sale… again)<p>I got back into having fun shopping for electronics when I encountered the YouTuber techmoan who got me buying things on EBay again after a ten year hiatus.<p>I’ve thought about an intelligent shopping agent that would extract offers from web sites, emails and such and filter really good ones. I have taken an occasional stab at it but it takes some discipline, after spending a few days or weeks getting the thing running it is tempting to buy something right away to close the cycle but you are only going to get an exceptional deal if you wait.