An Interview with Ethan Diamond

Oddpost debuted last year to a great fanfare in the web design community. With its desktop-quality experience and simple design, this web-based email application was unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

I had the opportunity to interview Ethan Diamond, President and co-founder of Oddpost, about this amazing web application.

Joshua Kaufman: I love the clean and simple interface of Oddpost. What’s your design strategy?

Ethan Diamond: Our strategy is to make the interface invisible, to make the mail data itself the interface. So, we started with the basic three-pane layout familiar to users of Outlook, Eudora, ccMail, and so on, and then we systematically eliminated every non-data pixel from the screen. For example, if a message header is bold, you know that the message has not been read. You don’t also need to see an icon of a closed envelope next to that header, and you certainly don’t need to see a column of hundreds of open envelopes towering next to the messages you have read. Similarly, the indentation of folders does a fine job of conveying hierarchy — little ant trails connecting every folder don’t express any further information.

In addition to omitting the redundant, or just plain content-free pixels (what the information designer Edward Tufte calls “chartjunk”), we’ve also tried to keep all but the most commonly used functionality out of the visual interface. The default message composition window in Outlook contains over 70 things you can click on. In Oddpost, we present you with the ten or so functions you use 90% of the time, a blinking cursor, and that’s it. You of course still have access to the remaining rarely used 10%, but that functionality is neatly tucked away, available via menus, shortcut keys, or, if you prefer, permanently activated via preferences.

We believe all this visual paring is important for several reasons. First, the resolution of the computer screen is very low — just a fraction of a percent of the data density of the printed page — and thus every last pixel is extremely valuable. Second, many people now spend a big chunk of their workday sitting in front of their mail clients. As a result, little things can, over time, have a big impact on productivity. If, for example, an economical design allows for a few more message headers, lines of an email, or words of a subject to make it onto the screen, the time you save not scrolling all over the place can quickly add up. Finally, a simple design facilitates focused thought. We’ve succeeded if you’re thinking about what you’re reading and writing. We’ve failed if you’re forming an opinion about a toolbar’s 3D drop-shadow, or contemplating which of an army of buttons produces a smiley face.

This data-centric approach may sound painfully obvious, but consider that at 1024x768 (the most common resolution on the web), only about 30% of Yahoo! Mail’s inbox screen is devoted to your mail. The remaining 70% is not, as you might expect, all devoted to advertising. In fact, ads only account for about 10% of the screen real estate, and the remaining 60% is consumed by navigation, dead space and administrative debris. This low data density is one of the reasons why Yahoo! Mail is really only acceptable for occasional use. Our objective with Oddpost has always been to become your primary email client, the kind of application that you could reasonably use all day long.

JK: Oddpost has been criticized for not being cross-platform because it requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher for Windows. Are there any plans to include more browsers?

ED: Shortly after Doc posted his denouncement, Evan Williams, creator of Blogger, responded:

…I don’t get it. I can see how it’s annoying if you can’t use something you’ve heard is cool. But it’s not evil. I’m all for cross-platformness, but I also don’t see the harm if someone wants to take advantage of some kick-ass functionality that exists in IE5W and no where else. If they didn’t, the product just wouldn’t exist (or would exist in a less-interesting way) and no one would benefit from the cool functionality. Interesting, you don’t hear these complaints if a piece of software is platform-exclusive but not delivered in a web browser, which is really an arbitrary technical point. If Oddpost is evil, why isn’t iTunes, or HomeSite?

Evan is obviously a very wise and excellent human being, because he hits on the key point: Oddpost is not a web page, it’s a software application. Web pages, whether devoted to totally pajama-less coed pajama parties or The Declaration of the Rights of Man, present information, and there is a good and widely held belief that information should be available to everybody. Fortunately for this principle, it’s not all that difficult, nor is it particularly expensive, to make a web page available to anyone, regardless of their platform choice. Software applications, on the other hand, are tools, and it’s absurd to apply the web’s freedom of information standard to them. Moreover, software applications, with all the incredible sophistication that that label implies, require tremendous cost and effort to develop for any single platform. For web applications like Oddpost, W3C standards mitigate, but absolutely do not negate this truth. This is a point we often have to make, but never to anyone with even a modicum of cross-browser web application experience.

So, given the challenges of application development, we made a very simple business decision: we chose to target the platform with 95% of the market. If, in some infinitesimal way, this choice bolsters Microsoft’s browser monopoly, that’s unfortunate, but Oddpost is a for-profit business, not a monument to justice. We don’t hate Macs, Opera, or standards, and most of us don’t even worship Satan. But market forces dictate our behavior. It makes no sense to exhaust half our development resources catering to 5% of the market. Until the Patron Saint of DHTML Development drops off the briefcase full of money,* we’ll continue to focus on making the best possible product for the majority of people on the web.

*Saints may drop the briefcase off at Oddpost, Inc. 609 Pacific Ave, SF, CA 94133

JK: Oddblog, where you “prattle on incessantly about bug fixes, feature additions and all things Oddpost,” is always informative and enjoyable to read — an uncommon combination for support weblogs. Why Oddblog and why the humor?

ED: Well, before the blog I was busy putting inappropriate comments in our code and unnecessarily lengthy entries in our bug database, so the first reason for Oddblog is to confine this noise to a more suitable locale. It’s also turned out to be an excellent marketing tool. The blogging community deeply appreciates the concept of reading as an activity you perform when you have absolutely nothing better to do, and our subject matter fits that bill perfectly. The result is a blog that drives a surprising amount of traffic back into the site. Finally, the blog is a much better way of communicating with our subscribers than sending out mass email. Reading ahead, I see that this last point provides a nice segue into your next question:

JK: What’s next for Oddpost?

ED: Businesses who want to run their own Oddpost web mail server in conjunction with an existing IMAP server will be happy to know that that product just entered beta and is available at www.deerfield.com. Humans who could care less about mail servers will be happy to know that as of June 18, you can read all of your favorite news and blogs from right within Oddpost. Rather than waste time each day clicking on a bunch of bookmarks, half of which take you to sites that haven’t posted any new content since your last visit, you can instead sit back, check your mail, and get all the latest stories from the BBC, Wired, Slashdot, Salon, Scripting News, Oddblog of course… the list is endless. (The geeks in the audience will know that I’m talking about RSS aggregation, and hopefully understand why I waited until the third sentence to drop this acronym.) Anyway, we believe that news and email go together perfectly. After all, the most common thing you do with an article, besides read it, is send it along to a friend, and in Oddpost that’s now as easy as clicking the forward button. You can definitely expect to see much deeper applications of this technology from us in the near future. Thanks Joshua!

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Ethan Diamond is President and co-founder of Oddpost, Inc.

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