I have been using Gmail for a long time now. I really love using the intuitive design and very good usability. I get about 50+ emails everyday in my personal gmail inbox. I use various filters and labels to sort my emails, but there are times when I have to label the emails by myself, without using the filters. I have more than 25 labels (I guess) and it is difficult to reach to the label starting with ‘P’ or ‘S’. I have to scroll down my huge list of labels, which is painful if I have to label a few emails.
When I was at Googleplex earlier this year, I saw a Google employee had a workaround to this problem. She added ‘_’ (an underscore) in front of the labels she wanted to see on the top. She added multiple underscores to labels depending what position she wanted it to show in the list. This work around is good, but not really a solid solution.
To begin with I would like to see ‘most frequently used’ labels on top. This will make life easier. Although a better solution would be to have an inline editing (think Google Calendar or Flickr) to add tag and as the user starts typing the label, the interface should suggest the labels.
It will be good to see Gmail team to make labeling emails easier!