I shall now deploy my catch phrase: Shut Up and Ship! (<a href="http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/shut-up-and-ship.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jgc.org/2010/08/shut-up-and-ship.html</a>) which I probably stole from Zawodny.<p>The concept video is very annoying because of the 'arty' way it's been filmed. They have shown three ideas: sort mail by sender, sort by conversation and show me all attachments. So far, so good. What they haven't mentioned is any form of search functionality or foldering. Looking at my inbox right now I see a set of separate conversations from different people about the same topic (in this case, OSCON). What you want to get on top of email is automatic foldering (pet topic) so that you get an intelligent view of your email.<p>What's shown in the video seems to be pretty basic wrapped up in a flowery dress to make it look like something amazing. I can believe that people would appreciate clean email interfaces, but this seems like it doesn't take into account real world stuff like figuring out who's cc:ed on a message or what the subject line is, or what happens when an exchange of messages stops being between two people and starts being between three or more.
I don't normally mind artsy but this is <i>ridiculous</i>. The video is zoomed, focused, and tilted to excess. Am I supposed to get a meaningful impression of it that way?
For a concept based on "a critical analysis of how people manage their emails and use their email clients" it contains an awful lot of design flaws.<p>The general workflow is pretty cool; different view modes, conversations etc. but then I see how the mother writes an email in the video (between 0:35 and 0:55) and I am surprised she can figure anything out.<p>The email pane is an intimidating white modal window, that does not give any visual cues as to what you can do with it. How can I drag it? Can I type anywhere? How do I send or dismiss it? To whom will it be sent?<p>Apparently messages have a subject (at least they are still email), but this is implicit. Having taught some older people how to use email, I know they struggle a lot with the concept of having a subject and they often confuse message and subject. With this subject, I am pretty sure the average "mom" will end up sending every message with the subject "Dear David" or something like that.<p>The sequence is concluded by the woman sending the email (around 0:53). She moves the mouse to the bottom of the message and all of a sudden a fucking tool bar pops up out of nowhere. There is no indication that that thing was even there, so how is anyone going to know that was there to begin with?<p>Don't get me wrong, there is a lot that can be improved about the way we interact with email, and there are a lot of things in this concept that I really like (for example the contact-list on the left, allowing you to drop a photo on a person's face to send it to them), but they introduce new flaws that are unacceptable. The footer of the page says the authors are from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, so I would have expected that rather than spending a lot of time on creating a sexy video (mission accomplished) they had put their concept to the test with some actual users. No doubt these flaws would have come to light immediately.
They are advancing the concept of 'conversations' that Gmail introduced in an interesting direction. Basically, the second tab at the top is the Gmail conversation view. This view collects emails by topic, which makes it behave more like a threaded discussion board in a way.<p>The interesting part is the first tab though, the 'people' view. They seem to go for an IM-style persistent conversation log between a fixed set of people. That is quite an interesting way of looking at conversations, pushing email further from the original 'digital letter' towards shorter, more transient messages. Basically, it tries to make email behave more like a persistent IM chat.<p>I find it interesting how the email protocol gets pushed more and more in the background and applications implement their own interfaces on top of it. Email seems to evolve from the definite way of sending stuff over the internet towards just one other communication protocol that is more or less on equal footing with, say, Jabber, or Facebook, or maybe even Twitter.<p>What with Facebook integrating email into its site and Google dumping IM chat logs in your Gmail inbox, there is even some sort of cross-protocol talk. This gets even more obvious with Facebook or Google+ or Twitter sending you emails whenever you receive messages on their platform. Now if you could reply to these emails and the platform would 'do the right thing', this would actually implement email as a ubiquitous interface to all of these services.<p>Interesting times!
Shame all the innovation in email clients seems to be happening predominantly on the Mac. Havent seen any Windows versions of any of these kind of apps.<p>I wonder if we'll ever see an iPad version of anything like this, because i'd certainly be interested.
On a side note, this further cements the idea that its still worthwhile to disrupt boring or old markets if they havent had disruption for a long time.
1) Build it. Concept videos are nice and all, but its vaporware till people can use it.<p>2) I think most people these days have switched to webmail in one form or another. Build this as a web app, not a strict desktop client. Also, as a web app its relatively easy these days to wrap it in a framework that will present it as a desktop app if someone wants to use it that way.
Seems like the concept of providing more "human" or "natural" interaction between user and computer is becoming more and more pervasive, and Persona is just another example about that.<p>I don't know what to think about it. As a casual user, I like it. It make interaction with the computer effortless. On the other side, as a power user, I still like to Unix philosophy of small powerfull tools and an easy ways to combine and automate them.<p>I really hope someone will eventually find a way to mix both of those concepts and bring software to the next level.
Where is the analysis of how people already use email and how it fails? How is this going to improve the experience?<p>There are a ton of research areas for email/messaging, such as those below. This seems to address none of them.<p>- better searching<p>- multiple sources (email, SMS, RSS, twitter .. in one place)<p>- automatic classification of incoming email, flagging important items, separating personal and business etc<p>- integrating to-do lists
While I think that the video would use a change in voice-over (something more clear and more emotional), there was something touching that moved me near the end and made me think about people and simple, day-to-day life. Maybe it's the sountrack. Anyway, well done :).
I like what he is saying and what they are showing, but email and particularly this type of email client will be all about the small touches. I just can't get a sense for something like this until I feel it for myself.
I think a lot about this since email clients still seem like something done by a developer without wasting much time thinking about the user experience. For instance, I'd say most personal email conversations are between only two people and yet we still can't see it as the usual chat view which is much more easier to read, like shown on the video and the screenshots.<p>Please do it and keep improving it as there's a lot of potencial here. Good work!
Finally a client that merges / blurs the line between my email conversations and my IM conversations. I like to have a Skype open as a continuous conversation with people, like a link dump or easy way to share files. This seems to do the same for email. Great.
Attachment view is one innovation that stands out, abstracting attachments from emails to allow independent file-system like browsing of them would be great.<p>This client might be a little late to the party in terms of clean UI as something new, what with Mail 5 coming out soon, Sparrow (assuming your a desktop mail kind of person).<p>On a side note, that whole webpage as an image is making my skin crawl.
The "minimalistic" email compose window will baffle and annoy anyone not in the "focus mode" Lifehack community. It does not look user friendly at all. To my knowledge, writing email in a window with a subject field and a send button was not causing anyone friction. I don't think the world is ready or looking for windows with unlabeled fields and hidden buttons.
I used NEO from Caelo (nelsons email organiser) for five years+ [[ employer INSISTED on using freakin' Msft and Outlook ]]. NEO is an overlay (non-invasive) on top of Outlook that does all this and more - free text search etc. NEO saved me an hour a week at least. [[ No personal relationship with Caelo I just think NEO is awesome. ]]
Looks cool and polished. Email client space is heating up, I wonder how this will fare against sparrow.<p>By the way, does anyone know how the DOF effect in the video is achieved? Guess it was added during post processing in software.
I must be one of the only people out there who thinks that the experience of sending/receiving emails in Gmail and/or Outlook is just fine today, thanks.
Why isn't this being developed? The design looks great, but like many are saying...a concept is only the halfway point. The video sold me, but it'd be nice if I could at least sign up for a beta invite or something. Seeing "concept" all over the page left me a bit hopeless of ever using the product.
WHAT IS THAT MUSIC? :( I just stuck a fork in my ear!! Thanks man. Or, in other words, if you make a video, don't distract people by giving them suicide feelings!