Inner circle: people centered email client

ABSTRACT

We present an automatic people-centered organization of the email message store, where all the information is organized by the association with the message sender or recipients. By using a zoomable list control, we can show most frequent contacts on the top level, and still scale to a large number of contacts overall. Messages exchanged with a person or any ad-hoc defined group are displayed as a continuous conversation. Individual nuggets sent in email, such as attachments and links, are extracted from messages and put into their own window. Organizing nuggets into people-oriented shared spaces supports email-based collaboration. The proposed email client enhancements tested very well in a preliminary user study.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Electronic mail

Keywords:
asynchronous collaboration, categorization, email, email-based sharing, organization, zooming user interface