Over the past several years, the Collaborative User Experience research group, in conjunction with the Lotus Software division of IBM, has been investigating how people use email and how we might design and build a better email system. In this demonstration, we will show a prototype email client developed as part of a larger project on “reinventing email.” Among other new features, this prototype incorporates novel visualizations of the documents within mail databases to aid understanding and navigation. The visualizations include a thread map for navigating among related messages, a correspondent map for highlighting the senders of messages, and a message map which shows message relationships within a folder. Our goal in developing this prototype is to gather user experience data as people try these visualizations and others on their own email.
By: Steven L. Rohall
Published in: RC22943 in 2003
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