Becoming Superhuman 🦸‍♂️📧

Why I love Superhuman & what can still be improved

Superhuman is the internet’s new favorite email client — “the fastest email experience ever made.” Combining a bunch of email tools (e.g. templates, keyboard shortcuts, reminders) and a minimalist design, Superhuman helps email power users get down to inbox zero easily and quickly.

I’m a scrooge, so admittedly I was skeptical about paying $30/month for email. However, after using it for two months, I’m totally obsessed and think I should’ve gotten on board earlier!

Meet Jonathan, desperately in need of email therapy

Time to declare email bankruptcy!

I actively manage 4 email accounts, ranging from personal to school to work. I probably have over 30 email newsletters subscriptions (way more than what I can keep up with), most of which I don’t even end up reading. So, my inboxes are cluttered with unread email, email that I’m late responding to, email that I should act upon that I end up forgetting about, or important pieces of information that are impossible to find. A heroic effort was required to save my inbox…

Enter Superhuman

Superhuman has helped me stay on top of my email and actually hit inbox zero, and here’s what I love about it!

1) Focus

There are two types of email in Superhuman’s world: ‘Important’ and ‘Other’. A simple concept well executed, Superhuman’s smart filtering turns my inbox from hundreds of unreads that bury important emails into a shortlist of the few key emails to tackle and respond to. Emails in the inbox are now to do items, and like with any to do list, prioritization is crucial. Superhuman therefore clears the distractions and highlights the important communications, and with that I have gotten much better with prioritizing and managing email.

Who wouldn’t want to hit Inbox Zero to see this?

2) Built in email extension tools

Some of the shortcuts in composing email (including send later & reminders)

I’ve alluded to some of the email tools that Superhuman comes with — besides reminders, there are send later options, email templates, read receipts, and more. Previously, I used a bunch of different email extensions to achieve this functionality, but never got full utility as the friction to adopting it into my email workflow was too much for me. Superhuman’s native integration of these features paired with the keyboard shortcuts however has made it so much more seamless to use, and they’re now an integral to how I triage and handle email.

Removing friction is a big part of what makes Superhuman powerful. For someone such as myself who was already hacking solutions together to increase email productivity, bringing it together like how Superhuman does was the missing piece I needed to maximize utilization.

3) User education

Superhuman has a high touch, half hour long onboarding process to get new users accustomed to the product. For me, the most impactful part of this concierge-like onboarding was undoing my bad email habits and learning new ones that Superhuman facilitated. For example, I used to keep emails unread if I wanted to follow up, which would clutter my inbox and I’d forget about them because they’d get lost in the deluge of more emails. Now, instead, I clear the email away with a reminder to keep my inbox clean and focused, knowing Superhuman will ping me again at a later, more appropriate time.

Remind yourself later instead of letting it sit around!

The untrained user would likely churn away from the product because they wouldn’t be able to realize its benefits, unless they knew how to “Superhuman” their email. Teaching users new habits is hard, but the onboarding paired with subtle nudges to use shortcuts and an in-product manual has converted me to an email ninja.

What I’d love to see next!

While Superhuman has made my email experience significantly better, I would say there’s still plenty of room for improvement, here are a few things I’d love to see implemented!

1) Improved ‘Split Inbox’

So I mentioned there are two types of emails in Superhuman: Important & Other. Not exactly true. Superhuman has a ‘Split Inbox’ feature that basically acts like an email filter/tab. The base functionality is pretty useful, for example you can easily split your inbox into a tab for newsletters or a tab for emails from the same domain, so it helps group email and keep your main inbox uncluttered.

Custom inbox splits, however, are difficult to set up. Splits are created from email search queries, so creating a custom split for school related email for example — combining various club listservs, updates from Piazza & Canvas, academic news — requires layering several filters that the regular email users would not figure out easily.

I think there are many things that can be done here, from tutorials on making custom splits, to smart suggestions, or even community templates, that would make using inbox splits a lot easier. Given many email users aren’t search query gurus, I think a friendlier drag & drop UI would be better understood.

2) Unsubscribe suggestions

Realistically not going to read 100+ emails from newsletters!

So it’s great that my newsletter subscriptions are now tucked away, but then they start piling up and I never get to them. Some of them I actually do really want to open and read! Some of them I have no idea why I’m still subscribed. Superhuman should have a bunch of data on what emails I’m opening, which emails get archived without opening, which are just left sitting there. I can imagine unsubscribe suggestions based on that data to start cutting away the clutter.

3) Nudges

This feature is borrowed from GMail, where GMail would have a nudges for email that I hadn’t responded to, or asked whether I wanted to follow up on an email if I hadn’t received a reply after a couple days.

It’s inevitable that some email ends up lurking around the bottom of the inbox. Superhuman can have some nudges or proactive suggestions to act upon these pieces of email — for example “haven’t responded in 3 days, reply?” or “remind me if no response in a day.” These nudges though might have to be used sparingly though to avoid cluttering the user interface and becoming a distraction themselves.

$30 / month for email sounds absurd at first.

But how would you quantify better communication, focus, productivity, and peace of mind? Certainly not for everybody, and certainly not 100% perfect, but Superhuman has my vote for how I want to do email moving forward!