The folks over at Google have posted an explanation of Gmail chat and what they hope to accomplish. On their blog site they analysis what they have learned from experimenting with different features and using user feedback in which they determine what Google chat should be. On their site they state:

Often, the features we launch seem so simple that you might think they’re the result of blatantly obvious design decisions. In fact, every feature is subjected to a healthy dose of scrutiny within the Gmail team, and usually that includes rapidly iterating on designs by collecting user feedback, learning what works and what doesn’t, and improving on our work based on this knowledge.

We took each of these ideas into the usability lab where users were asked to try them out and tell us what they thought. From these studies we learned that chatting was one of many multi-tasking activities that users performed, and that chats needed to be quickly available at any time, not just within a single email or on a separate page.

With chat and other features, collecting live feedback from real users helps evolve feature ideas into simple and more elegant experiences. These extra steps may add a little time to our development cycle, but they allow us to create a design that works well for the tens of millions of Gmail users.

Have you used Gmail chat? What is your opinion of it? What are your likes and dislikes?

Comments welcome.

Source.