Why does all encrypted email services have bad designs?

Have you also been riding the new wave of internet privacy lately and have found yourself looking for a new email provider in order to switch out Google, Microsoft and all the other massive providers? If you have, you have probably noticed that all of the encrypted services on the market have bad designs and doesn’t seem very appealing. Could this potentially have en effect on their business or do people use them anyway?

High security and bad design.

In today’s world you don’t see many examples of services focused around high security and encryption that also have a great design that makes the service appealing the world around them. Somehow it seems that in order to provide a good security you need to strip your visual design to something that could have come out of Windows 98.

One of the services that we are going to be looking at today is called ProtonMail and it is being developed by a Swiss company. ProtonMail is probably the service on the market with the most modern and appealing design i have seen so far, but still it lacks much in order to rank high on my design-list.

ProtonMail.

The standard design you get presented with when entering ProtonMail is flat and most of the text-colors are so washed out that they are hard to see on a regular computer screen. For certain people with lower vision this is a really bad approach since they need a higher contrast in order to differentiate letters from the background. Design-wise there are many ways that ProtonMail could improve in order to make it better for their customers around the world. If I was the designer I would probably have started by making a light/standard mode and a dark-mode in order to accommodate people with different needs. Some people tend to read letters easily on white background with black text and others tend to read better on black background with white text.

After looking at the most critical step which for me would be the contrast, I would do a redesign of the buttons and header in order to make them more modern. In the header I feel that too much text is visible and only the icons should be used. A good saying is that if you need text to explain what an action or menu link does, then you haven’t used the right icon. I would also adjust the maximum width of the email-content container to make it more readable. Text on a screen is much easier to read once it has been placed into a more narrow section, typically around 900 pixels.

Tutanota.

Tutanota is a free and open-source email service originated from Germany. On their website www.tutanota.com they have an appealing red theme and the design is very approachable, but once you have signed up for a free email and get started with their email-interface it is a different story.

When logging into Tutanota’s email client you are met with a flat and gray design that to be honest doesn’t look very modern or appealing. The text is washed out just like it is on ProtonMail which makes the text hard to read and some proportions seems off. When inspecting the design further I would say that there is a lack of white-space and consistency on multiple places which breaks the experience.

If I was the designer on Tutanota I would implement some of the design techniques used on their website since white-space, colors, contrast and general look seemed much much more appealing. The general feeling of Tutanota’s email client is a half-finished unprofessional product which might give some people the feeling that they can’t be trusted with their email content. The icon’s in the buttons have different sizes, proportions between icon-sizes and font-sizes seems off, and many other things. In my opinion there are definitely space for improvement and once it arrives on Tutanota i believe that this could become something very big and leading on the journey of internet-privacy.

Why is the design important?

We are living in a time where design is more important than ever and currently all encrypted email providers aren’t providing a good design. In this article we only looked at 2 providers, but there are many more on the market which have the same problem as these. In today’s age we are trying to make more and more people join the fever of internet privacy, but without the right approaches it will be hard.

People are driven by design and trends, so in order to get more people on board you need to provide what people want. So one thing is getting people on board and the other is that when using bad design you break the experience for your customers. The customer might not be seeing so good, so just by providing a bad contrast you are pushing those customers away.

Design can be a huge help for your product, but it can also damage it when not used correctly. When building services like these, function should not be the only focus. I hope that this message is getting to those people working with these services in order to hopefully make a change. I am a big supporter of internet privacy and there is nothing i want more than to see these services get popular and take us into a new age of internet privacy.