Yandex Mail
Yandex 360, an all-in-one virtual office with a broad range of services for efficient workflows: Mail, Cloud storage, Documents, Calendar, Video calls, Messenger, Notes. Yandex Mail is the second most popular email service in the region, with an audience of over 50 million active B2C users per month.
360.yandex.com/mail ・ Mail @ App Store ・ Mail @ Google Play
Why
The mail inbox is cluttered with hundreds of unread messages, with an average of 12 new emails daily. Navigating this chaos to find important messages needing immediate attention is challenging.
Who
The Mail service has an audience of 50 million active users who use it for their personal needs—personal correspondence, confirmations and notifications, and marketing emails.
When and Where
Email is used regularly, with users typically checking their inbox 2-3 times a week from any convenient location and on various devices.
What
A new AI-powered widget integrates into the main layout of the service, displaying the three most important emails received in the last 7 days.
Results
  • +12%
    B2C customer satisfaction index within the first month
  • 41%
    Users interact with the widget daily
My role: I served as a product designer, preparing the initial concepts, and later led the design of this product.
Design Process
  • Empathise and Define
    Our study identified a primary pain point: regular users have too many unread emails, making it difficult to find the truly important ones.
  • Ideate
    We began by exploring initial hypotheses based on the capabilities of Yandex AI, focusing on how we could summarize information for users to streamline and speed up their interaction with email.
  • Prototype
    We focused on solving this problem by leveraging our tool's ability to analyze emails, summarize them, and highlight important information. We then began designing the interface and training our model accordingly.
  • Test
    The service will initially launch in test mode for Yandex employees, allowing us to gather extensive feedback and ideas. Based on this input, we made slight modifications to the original layout.
  • Iterate through each step ↑
Live Product
→ Empathise and Define
In 2023, Yandex announced its own model of GPT and AI, which can be easily integrated into any products within the company.
We began by exploring initial hypotheses based on the capabilities of Yandex AI and the information we could summarise for the user, thereby streamlining and speeding up their interaction with it.
Among the concepts were the following:
・ altering the text of emails according to specified parameters (making them clearer, simpler, more formal);
・ summarising email threads;
・ summarising the points and actions of meetings conducted in Telemost, a video calling service;
・ summarising unread emails in the mailbox, and others.

We made the decision to focus on developing solutions for the product with the largest audience Yandex Mail which has an audience of over 50 million active users per month. And we set out to explore what users find most challenging when interacting with email. Also, how Yandex GPT can handle arrays of emails.

We conducted a study on the primary pain points users experience when interacting with email and identified a major issue: regular users have too many unread emails, making it difficult to find the ones that are truly important.
→ Ideate and Prototype
We focused on solving this problem, as our tool was capable of analysing emails, summarising them, and highlighting important information. We began designing the interface and training our model accordingly.
→ Test and Iterate
The service will initially launch in a test mode for Yandex employees, allowing us to gather a vast amount of feedback and ideas. Based on this input, we slightly modified the initially designed layout.
The service was launched for all Yandex Mail users on April 4, 2024.
Contacts