I love using Gmail, both for my personal emails and for business. It's easy, lightweight, and it has a great interface. But there's this one thing that bugs the usability geek in me (used to be a UX researcher in a previous life): the autocomplete function for email address recipients.
What's wrong with Autocomplete in Gmail's "To" field?
Well... it doesn't work in one important use-case: company domains. I sometimes forget the names of people I want to reach out to. I'm very bad with names. I do know who I want to reach out to, I remember the company they work for, but if I type in the company name or domain I don't get any suggestions.
Here's an example: I'm using Bogdan at HowToWeb (I know he won't mind). So let's say I forgot his name but want to message him at HowToWeb and I type in "howtoweb" in Recipients ("To" field). Nothing happens. I don't get any autocomplete suggestions.
Of course, if I start typing his name I will get suggestions - people who share the first letters of his name:
Having autocomplete suggestions on the company / domain name would be even more useful in case I want to message more people at the same company. People with whom I corresponded before, directly or as part of a thread.
Google's autocomplete function works well both in Google Search and in Gmail Smart Compose. Not so well when suggesting people based on their company domain. I think it should be an easy fix since Google stores all the email addresses and domains I have used in the past.
What do you think? Is this use case applicable to you? Do you see it as being a feature you would need as well?