Designing Remail: Reinventing the Email Client through Innovation and Integration

The Remail design team defined a specification for an innovative and integrated email client. This design-lead effort tackled three key problems that email researchers have discovered: lack of context, co-opting of email, and keeping track of too many things. Based on earlier design and research explorations, we conceived of a client from the ground up that attacked these problems in an integrated fashion. Our solutions were based on three constructs: showing message context, marking email, and selective display. A small team of programmers implemented much of the design in a functional prototype. This experimental client continues to allow researchers to expand and explore these concepts.

By: Bernard Kerr, Eric M. Wilcox

Published in: RC23300 in 2004

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