Mailbox UX: How Mailbox Builds User Love

The queue was really a genius tactic. It's addicting to check back, open the app, and see the number of people in front of you drop by hundreds or even thousands, and the total number of people behind you increase as well. Their traction is insane, seems to be somebody requests an invite every other second on average. The real-time updating of the queue was a super smart move.

And another middle man accessing my mail. Privacy hell. Would never use.<p>Edit: Haiku style:<p><pre><code> Middleman sees mail, welcome to privacy hell. I would never use. </code></pre> Edit2: Well, maybe not. Is it a client app or is it a middle man app? Why is it requesting permissions to Gmail instead of using IMAP? Weird.

I think the waiting list and UX built hype, sure, but not love.<p>The majority of tweets in my stream since it "launched" were negative. Interestingly enough, this is impacting their App Store rating, too:<p><a href="http://cl.ly/image/0Z3P412a2l1Y" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/image/0Z3P412a2l1Y</a> (Screenshot)

Interesting to note how the reservation system has impacted ratings in the App Store with a ton of one star reviews complaining about the wait. Might take a long time, if even possible for them to recover their average. Unintended consequences, or maybe they don't care?

I wonder what their team looks like. Like, how many software engineers do they got going, and how many self-proclaimed product people and "Mobile UX super experts with awesome ideas" are around.

Aside from their new user experience, I wonder what the impact of the queue has been.<p>Does it make people want to use the app more or push the app out of memory?