Visualizing E-mail with a Semantically Zoomable Interface

Abstract

We introduce a semantically zoomable interface that displays emails as interactive objects rather than files containing lines of text, as in traditional e-mail interfaces. In this system, e-mails are displayed as node objects called e-mail nodes within a 2.5-dimensional world. The e-mail nodes are semantically zoomable and each may be rearranged to different locations within the plane to organize threads, topics, or projects. The prototype for this system was built using the Piccolo toolkit, the successor of Pad++ and Jazz [2,3]. Keywords:Clutter, e-mail, information visualization, Piccolo, semantic zoom MOTIVATIONFigure 1: Example of a traditional e-mail inbox.In a typical e-mail interface, we may find a set of e-mails listed in a sorted, linear format (Figure 1). Although it is a format that we have seen since our first encounter with an e-mail application, many of us still find it difficult to efficiently organize e-mails or quickly find what we need amidst the clutter. With the large amount of personal and business e-mails -sent, received, forwarded, carbon-copied, or spammed -each day, this has increasingly become a problem for many e-mail users.Interface developers have tried to work around the problems of e-mail clutter by adding feature enhancements to e-mail interfaces. Feature enhancements include sort functions, search functions, folders, etc, which all have their benefits but not without their trade-offs. For example, studies show that most users actually end up keeping all of their e-mail in one large folder [9]. Some of these feature enhancements and others have become distractions to users rather than serving to efficiently manage e-mails. Many users still choose to manually search long lists of e-mails to find the target messages rather than use overloaded features in their e-mail applications. Thus, linear representations of e-mail often cause clutter and confusion for the user, and feature enhancements have turned out to be only addons, not solutions to the clutter problem.*e-mail: ellen.diep@tufts.edu †e-mail: jacob@cs.tufts.eduTo reduce task management issues and clutter within e-mail systems, we need to look for other ways of designing e-mail interfaces. Rather than focusing on feature enhancements, we need to focus more on natural designs that support user interaction. Research and applications investigating zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) have been produced for news articles [7], small-display PDA calendars [1], GIS maps and other graphics. Our system presents e-mails as semantically zoomable objects within a ZUI. If e-mails are represented as if they were tangible objects, rather than static or linear objects, we hope user interaction with them will be more natural and intuitive. THE ZOOMABLE E-MAIL SYSTEMFigure 2: E-mail interface prototype.Our prototype system (Figure 2) displays e-mails as semantically zoomable, rectangular nodes. The toolbar allows the user to select "drag" or "pan" radio buttons to drag the nodes or pan the entire viewing area, respectively. It also has a res...

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“…It is worth mentioning an application in the email domain that uses Piccolo, proposed by Diep and Jacob. This application shows emails as rectangular nodes and users are allowed to drag them or pan the entire viewing area (Diep, 2004). Yet, users have no special hints about relations among emails.…”