In 2001 (three years before Gmail launched) Remail integrated many capabilities into a single email app, including calendars, reminders, snooze, chat, note-taking, and an email thread visualization.
Remail created many new ways to mark emails. For example, with this new functionality, an email could be converted into a calendar event, a reminder, or a todo. Emails could be organized with collections (labels), and the details of email threads could now be seen at a glance.
Multiple features and innovations were integrated into a single design. [Click image to see more details.]
The area to the right of the inbox shows extra information or details in five tabs: Favorites, Chat Buddies, Threads, Collections and Sources. Any object inside these tabs could also set as an alert, for example set alert when a new message arrives in the current thread. The Favorites tab (left) allowed you to combine any of the objects from the other tabs into one view. The Thread tab showed contextual details on the current thread with the Thread Arc visualization.
Messages are positioned one after another as they arrive in the inbox. Each arc back from a message shows the reply relationship to a previous message.
This new visualization technique for email threads had the following attributes: chronology, relationships, compactness, stability, scalability, attribute highlighting, and scanability.
Remail and Thread Arcs
Reinvention of the email client with new features and visualizations to help manage the increasing demands of email (2001).
Email is used for everything
It is hard to imagine a world without email today. As a ubiquitous communication system, email has changed the way people live and work. While the uses of email have changed dramatically since its invention in 1971, keeping up with these new demands is a perpetual challenge. As the world moved to the internet in the dot-com boom of the late nineties, the diverse use of email exploded. Old email clients were not up for the task so our IBM Research team set out to redefine the email experience in 2001.
Key problems
Identified three key problems with email, which still exist today. First, what was originally designed as a message system was co-opted into a multi-functional application. It became a way to share files, track tasks, delegate responsibility, run projects, buy things, and so on. Second, it was clear that people were trying to keep track of too many things for email to manage gracefully. And third, conventional email clients gave very little contextual information about individual messages so they had to be dealt with one at a time, even if closely related to previous messages, topics, or conversations.
Design innovation and integration
Took lead role envisioning new features and integrated them into a single design specification.The project introduced many new features such as labels, notes, thread visualizations, real-time chat, and calendar integrations. As an historical note, Gmail did not launch until 2004; some of the features we invented such as reminders and snooze appeared only after Gmail launched Inbox in 2014.
Visualizing email threads
'Invented thread arcs to solve the email context problem. Designed this new thread visualization so full conversations could be seen in email at a glance.This visualization required a mixed-model representation that shows both the branching structure and the chronological sequence of messages simultaneously.Designed and built a prototype using Macromedia Director and Postscript, which was then tested with people’s own email. The results of this study were published and presented at the Info-Vis conference in 2003.Full details of the thread arc visualization.
Papers
Designing remail: reinventing the email client through innovation and integrationCHI 2004Thread arcs: An email thread visualizationIEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2003