Gentry Underwood: Why was there this strange gap in the market that we were able to move into? The gap was created by mobile devices themselves. It’s very natural when a new platform comes along to expect behavior to work as it did in the old platform, which means, for a smartphone, take a desktop email client and jam it down into the mobile device, because that’s all you know. You don’t know how people’s behavior is going to be different; you’ve never seen it before. Well, turns out we use our mobile phones really differently than we use our laptops. It’s taken us a while to figure that out and understand it, and that creates a design opportunity for a different kind of tool. Fundamentally, Mailbox is not an email client so much as it in an inbox, oriented around delightful processing.
Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment
Our groups focuses primarily on topics in human-computer
interaction (HCI) and information visualization
Yang is a Senior Research Scientist at Google, and an affiliate faculty member in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and conducted postdoctoral research in EECS at the University of California at Berkeley.