Google constantly tweaks its products and services behind the scenes and when its ready to make these changes public, it does. Though often we get a look at what’s going on behind the scenes. Since Gmail’s launch its user interface has been tweaked dozens of times but changes have come in succession and have rarely been a complete overhaul. But judging by a screenshot leaked recently the company might be working on a complete overhaul of Gmail’s user interface on the web.
At first glance the user interface looks a lot similar to Gmail’s mobile experience. It also appears to have been designed to function across variety of screen sizes without losing any functionality.
Instead of having tabs up top that were introduced into Gmail last year a fly-in menu system on the left appears in the screenshot. It even has a similarly collapsible Hangouts interface. At the bottom right hand corner of the display there appear to be buttons for email and reminder creation, offering easy one click access to some of the most used tasks in Gmail on the web. The new user interface also has a new pin system which replaces stars to identify important emails. Users will apparently be able to drag pinned emails to the top to keep them front and center at all times.
It can’t be said for sure if and when this overhauled user interface will go live for Gmail users. The source claims its only being internally tested right now. For all we know Google might make the decision to stick with the existing user interface for a bit longer.