“I get large amounts of emails from students, colleagues, supervisors and occasionally random senders. I mentally prioritize student emails and quicker tasks first and use folders and filters. I turn off notifications to avoid general interruptions but I still need messages from certain people.”
Redefining Importance via E-mail
Given a design brief, my team and I were tasked with designing a feature for a new or existing email application that provides ease in staying on top of important communication in one’s life. In the span of a month, our design process led us to create an Automated Importance Box.
Team Members: Juli Thach, Julian Clensy, Danielle Dixon
The Problem
People receive a staggering amount of emails.
Some are life-saving and can ensure you block off that 3-4pm next Tuesday for that All Staff Meeting you’ve been dreading. Others are a combination of the subscriptions you forget about, receipts from the coffee shop next door, rewards, etc.
Importance is subjective and highly dependent on the individual. Priorities and urgency may change.
For those that care about staying on top of their email, how can we strike a balance between helping people feel more in control while automating management?
Some are life-saving and can ensure you block off that 3-4pm next Tuesday for that All Staff Meeting you’ve been dreading. Others are a combination of the subscriptions you forget about, receipts from the coffee shop next door, rewards, etc.
Importance is subjective and highly dependent on the individual. Priorities and urgency may change.
For those that care about staying on top of their email, how can we strike a balance between helping people feel more in control while automating management?
The Solution
We created an importance inbox in our email application where emails could be separated by ‘Urgent’ and ‘Upcoming’.
The intention behind this would be that, with a quick right swipe over an email, people could quickly throw emails in a physical box (instead of their own mental box) if they couldn’t attend to it just at that second.
Upcoming emails would eventually bubble up to Urgent status at a set amount of time to free up both the number of gestures to organize as well as the mental space to determine your organization pattern.
The intention behind this would be that, with a quick right swipe over an email, people could quickly throw emails in a physical box (instead of their own mental box) if they couldn’t attend to it just at that second.
Upcoming emails would eventually bubble up to Urgent status at a set amount of time to free up both the number of gestures to organize as well as the mental space to determine your organization pattern.
In Summary...
WHAT IT IS
- Organization method automating priority notifications based on user preferences
- Allows ‘lost’ emails to continuously bubble up to the top
WHAT IT ISN’T
- Replacement for mental models of organization
Why this approach?
We began this process by having to do a lot of unlearning.
All of us were extremely familiar with applications such as ‘Gmail’ and ‘Outlook’, but we had to take into account what ‘structure’ was defined as for different user groups. Being at uni, we had great access to middle managers that were school faculty or from local businesses to give us a start. Whilst conducting interviews, we asked ourselves how the communication method of email differed from things like social platforms.
“Why can’t I Instagram DM my boss?” we asked.
This may seem like an obvious answer, but we genuinely wanted to consider some things. Both email and Instagram are ways of communicating with others. They can be used as a way of checking the status of others, and are so widely used that someone may raise an eyebrow if you don’t have them. What we realized, then, is that the social connotation of professionalism is something that prevailed when emailing someone. It was gathered from others that, although sometimes used as a 'dump' space, email is widely regarded as a means of business communication.
Structure was both directly provided by organizational features in different email applications such as folders, naming conventions and indirectly by the expectation that messages received in this way should be regarded with higher importance.
All of us were extremely familiar with applications such as ‘Gmail’ and ‘Outlook’, but we had to take into account what ‘structure’ was defined as for different user groups. Being at uni, we had great access to middle managers that were school faculty or from local businesses to give us a start. Whilst conducting interviews, we asked ourselves how the communication method of email differed from things like social platforms.
“Why can’t I Instagram DM my boss?” we asked.
This may seem like an obvious answer, but we genuinely wanted to consider some things. Both email and Instagram are ways of communicating with others. They can be used as a way of checking the status of others, and are so widely used that someone may raise an eyebrow if you don’t have them. What we realized, then, is that the social connotation of professionalism is something that prevailed when emailing someone. It was gathered from others that, although sometimes used as a 'dump' space, email is widely regarded as a means of business communication.
Structure was both directly provided by organizational features in different email applications such as folders, naming conventions and indirectly by the expectation that messages received in this way should be regarded with higher importance.
Research Highlights
We decided to focus on middle managers for our research based on the access we had to this audience and the perceived carry over that designing for these individuals would have on other groups (e.g. moms, students, business men, etc).
What we found were that these individuals were ‘busy enough’ to need certain organizational methods such as folders but also ‘too busy’ to tailor their email to every need. Some people may have shared the use of certain tools but everyone had tweaks in things like urgency, how they symbolized importance, and what they found important.
The beauty we found in how this group of people utilized their email was in what we called “individual filters”. We defined these as the creative, unintended ways people used features native to their desired email platform to achieve their desired goal. In this way, there were a number of permutations available for how people could organize their inboxes.
Our task, then, was to create a tool that could seamlessly fit into people’s individual filters while providing tools to automate some part of the organization process.
Considerations
We interviewed 4 people individually and conducted a focus group. Here’s some powerful considerations we gathered:
“I actually use a couple different emails. I use Gmail for spam and promotions and pretty much only use it for codes or deals. Outlook I use for work and keep super organized. I never leave an email unread and use folders for different categories and importance levels. When I get an email in Outlook, I prioritize it based on the sender and subject line, focusing on emails directly addressed to me.”
“ I receive a bunch of emails in a day, but I would say only around 40% require my direct attention; My staff handles large group emails. I used to create folders and categorize them myself but I’d often forget my mental code for grouping things together. I have both work and personal spam in a single email account so it gets very difficult to discern what’s important.”
Usability Testing
In conducting moderated in-person usability testing in our early designs, we found that there was a lot of confusion surrounding icons for urgency ‘now’ vs ‘later’.
We landed on the hourglass modeled after its usage in board games and found people’s answers shifting to the icon being synonymous with something that happens ‘later’.
As for signifying more immediate urgency, we landed on an exclamation mark as something that would universally signal a warning or sharp alert.
The swiping gestures were similar to existing motions for archiving already in Gmail for putting something away and essentially clearing space in one’s primary inbox.
Something that we agonized over for some time was the idea that this was a solution that was just providing yet another box to grow disorganized and annoying with time.
As such, during phase development we would like to continue iterating on the automation component and determining how much of the organization process we can standardize.
