Shahriar Sultan

Cloud Email & Calendar management platform

I designed a unified workspace for email, calendar, tasks, and chat. Four products in one nav. 22 minutes saved per user, per day.

Client

dMailHub

Industry

Productivity · Communications

Role

UI/UX Designer

Timeline

8 weeks

The Challenge

Most working adults run three to five inboxes and at least two calendars across providers. The tools to manage them are either decade-old desktop federations or new web apps that strip features to stay simple. Either way the user pays the same tax — tab-switching, missed events, replies a day late from the wrong account.

The Solution

I designed a single dark-mode workspace that absorbs email, calendar, tasks, and chat. The hard part wasn't adding features. It was deciding which habits from each app to honor and which to quietly redesign.

22 min

Saved per user, per day

time-tracking diary across 9 beta users

~0 sec

Account switch time

down from a 7-second native-app dance

4-in-1

Modules in one workspace

inbox, calendar, tasks, chat

01

The Approach

I owned UI/UX from strategy through engineering handoff. Four engineers, one product lead, eight weeks.

First two weeks were watching. Fourteen power users, screen recordings, time-tracking diaries. I needed to know which habits had to stay and which were just muscle memory waiting to be replaced.

Then I picked the unifying primitive — the account switcher. Every other module would inherit how it works. Get the switcher right and the rest of the app could orbit it.

02

Key Decisions

01 / 04

Account switcher is the first thing in the mail rail, not the seventh item in settings. Each account keeps its inbox count, its tabs, its labels. The user sees the active account by avatar, not by squinting at a header. Adding a fourth account takes three clicks.

Mailbox switch time fell from a 7-second native-app dance to instant.

02 / 04

Calendars from every connected account overlay on one month view, color-coded per account. Hiding one is a checkbox, not a buried setting. Users with two work accounts and a personal one stopped forgetting which calendar an event sat on.

Three of nine beta users canceled their separate calendar app in the first week.

03 / 04

Event creation borrows the depth of a CRM and the speed of a Google Cal quick-add. Time zone, priority, status, repeat, notification — all in one panel. Attendees from any connected account or external email, with a multi-tag UI that mirrors how people actually invite people.

Median event creation finished in 18 seconds even with four attendees and a custom recurrence.

04 / 04

Built-in 1:1 and group chat, with a contact panel that surfaces shared media and files inline. Chat lives next to the inbox, not in a separate app. A quick 'are you free?' doesn't need a context switch into Slack.

Two beta studios replaced Slack outright.

03

The Outcome

Before dMailHub I had four browser tabs open just to get through my morning. Now it's one window and the cognitive load is gone. The calendar overlay across my work and personal accounts alone earned the switch.

Priya Nair

Founder · Beta cohort, Wave 2

Account switcher — each inbox keeps its count and labels; switching is instant.

Calendar module — three accounts overlaid in one month view, color-coded per account.

What this means

Unification is rarely a tech problem. The hard call is which habits to honor and which to redesign. Honor too many and you ship a mess. Redesign too many and your power users churn. The work is in spending the first month deciding, not designing.

  • Add a focus-mode that hides three of the four modules with one shortcut. Power users keep asking for it.
  • Test a light theme. The dark-mode-only stance is honest but loses the segment that doesn't want a 'gamer' look.
  • Wire AI into the inbox. Smart replies and triage are table stakes by next year.
  • Top Rated on Upwork
  • 100% Job Success
  • $80K+ earned
  • 8+ years

Open to senior remote roles.

Full-time employment or long-term contract. Senior Product Designer or Senior UX Designer. Reach me on LinkedIn or by email.

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Or email hey@shahriarsultan.com

Cloud Email & Calendar management platform — I designed a unified workspace for email, calendar, tasks, and chat. Four products in one nav. 22 minutes saved per user, per day.