Email thread versus conversation

I actually thought the idea of a conversation as the exchange back and forth between two people would be well accepted in email clients, but having looked around it seems all email clients that refer to a 'conversation' actually display the thread view, i.e. emails linked together on a common subject regardless of who they're from. The Microsoft Outlook documentation in particular refers to the ability to view a "Conversation or Thread" which looked like you could have either when in fact Microsoft is using both "conversation" and "thread" to refer to the same view, grouping emails by their subject line.

This conflation of two different ideas will probably hamper the development of a more contact-centric view of email for another decade.

So in summary,
a thread view would be with an inbox grouped together by subject line, and
a conversation is the list of emails exchanged with a given user, e.g. as iPhone messaging:

Modifying the email client so it becomes more contact-centric (as in my earlier screenshots) radically increases the importance of the conversation view as defined above, and the pre-selection of the contact automatically creates a context for the conversation.

Contact images, and drag-and-drop for email

The screenshot below illustrates a couple of concepts.
Firstly is their any advantage in using portrait images for contacts where their email address might be? Maybe, maybe not. The assumption is a mouse-hover over the image would give the 'business card' with the usual information including email address and action buttons, and a 'click' on the image would take you to that 'contact' entry (as is assumed throughout this discussion of contact-centric email). A 'contact' that has no image would necessarily be represented by a similar-sized icon just containing the text email address or person name if that is available. But maybe the image at the top of a 'compose' makes it feel more like you're communicating with that person rather than their email inbox. I am aware that videoconferences that 'freeze' the image while the audio continues do still feel like a videoconference, just with an incredibly slow frame rate, so maybe there's something in this.
Secondly, it illustrates some aspect of where drag-and-drop fits in with the use of email. The open-source email client Thunderbird already allows 'contacts' to be dragged from the addressbook into the To: or Cc:, but this requires the addressbook to be opened in a separate window first. Having the contacts list (addressbook) more immediately to hand might ease this kind of drag-and-drop. Also, dragging a VCARD file from another desktop folder window (e.g. Windows Explorer) should have a similar effect, either adding the email address into a To: or Cc: field, or 'importing' that person entry to the mail address book. Drag-and-drop also makes sense for email 'attachments'.

Contact-centric email - 'conversation' view

On reflection, the 'email list' section of a 'contact-centric' view of email would be the sensible place for a 'conversation' email list view. I.e. the email to and from that contact interleaved. In my previous post I'd illustrated the 'contact view' with tabs for emails-from and emails-to that particular contact (which still might be useful) but I should also have considered the 'conversation view' which is simply the same email flows combined onto a single list, sorted by date, with the 'froms' and 'tos' clearly marked. The idea is you see the back and forth communication with that particular person in the correct order.
The mockup screenshot below illustrates the idea, although the actual 'style' of the page would need work. In particular there's a subtlety in that the user might have received an email from the contact by virtue of being on a Cc: list or From:, plus it might be useful to indicate which emails are 'replies' versus fresh 'conversations' - the screenshot below isn't great from a 'style' standpoint but is intended to illustrate the principle. 'Indent' has been use to mark the 'from' emails...
The 'Date' (Datum) column has sort up/down buttons - these might be more important on a 'conversation' view, as it is more natural to see the time flow from top to bottom, while email inboxes tend to be looked at with the newest at the top - this might be an important user preference.
Click to enlarge screenshot:

Contact-centric email

This blog post develops the basic thesis that collaboration is person-centric, while the most prevalent collaboration tool, i.e. email, remains firmly wedded to the concepts of 'folder' and 'email', leaving the concept of 'person' somewhat out in the cold.

This post is labelled 'contact-centric' (rather than person-centric) purely because 'contact' is the term used in most email clients. Actually email clients are often endowed with an 'address book', named after a thing that contains 'addresses', not people.

The argument is more fully developed on my contact-centric email page, itself really a specific example of the principles of data-driven web design.

All email clients support the concept of folder. I.e. you can click on the name of a 'folder' (e.g. Sent Items) and can expect to see a list of emails associated with that folder conveniently displayed.

All email clients support the concept of an email. I.e. if you see a list of emails (e.g. after clicking on a folder name above) then you can expect the contents of that email to be conveniently displayed.

Person has a long history of being effectively an attribute of an email, i.e. a piece of data in the form of an email address that may appear in the From, To or CC fields. As mentioned above, email clients have added 'address books' over the years but almost entirely as a convenient cache of email addresses to aid the primary task of writing an email. Person (aka Contact) remains a poorly supported entity in the system, certainly compared to 'folder'.

It doesn't have to be this way. Rather than being hidden behind an 'address book' icon which effectively takes you 'out' of your email tool, your list of contacts could be displayed within your 'main' email view.

For 'Person' to be treated at least as importantly as 'folder', something more useful should happen when you click on a person name. The illustration below shows how the 'contact pane' could actually be a composite of contact details plus mails-from and mails-to the person concerned.

Regarding 'Person', the additional consideration is what would you click on to bring you to this view? The obvious answer is the name of a contact in the contacts list (aka 'address book') left-pane. In addition the same view could be reached when clicking on any email address in the To:, From: or CC: fields of any email.

So the 'person page' has two primary qualities that distinguish it from current 'traditional' implementation of email clients:

1. All useful information derivable from a given individual is accessible from their 'person-page', and in many cases that information is 'promoted' to appear on the page itself (rather than being provided in the form of a link that takes you away from the person page). The 'Sent' tab in the illustration above keeps the user on the person page, not off to an 'inbox view' that happens to be sorted by email address.
2. Clicking on a person reference (typically in the form of their email address) consistently brings the user to this view.

This post doesn't attempt to provide the definitive answer on what should be on the email person-page, but provides instead an illustration that should easily justify its value. Given a person page, there are many opportunities for collecting information even within the email system that could appear on this page. For example

• the mail lists to which that users belongs
• relationship scores with other users of the email system (equally this allows the collection of contacts with whom this user is most associated)
• other systems (e.g. voicemail) may provide additional information that can be incorporated.

Telepresence

It seems likely that in the future it will be less likely that you'll need to attend meetings 'in person'... but this promise has been around for a long time without an accepted solution.

Cisco have established a strong presence in the market with their design for a purpose-built room (generically a videoconferencing suite):

The Apple iPhone 4 has a forward-facing camera and a built-in application / service called FaceTime

We will see how prevalent the FaceTime application will become when the next iPad arrives (spring 2011?), largely expected to also have a forward-facing camera. Then, if you can't attend a meeting, maybe send your iPad instead?

Or if you're not at your desk, just leave your iPad there?

For both of these images, I've done some liberal cut-and-pasting and scaled the iPad up, but you get the idea. Or maybe your remote avatar should be mobile as suggested by Anybot?

Or maybe you'll have a telepresence android?



So there's a range of options there, and we'll see which approach proves to be popular. The fact is that the internet is mostly (in volume terms) used to transmit video, bandwidth is the easiest internet parameter to increase, so this is going to lead to significant developments before long. This particular post is intended to illustrate the 'physical' end of the meeting, e.g. the picture of the guy sitting at his desk so you can walk in there and talk to him. Obviously the 'user' of the telepresence device is sitting somewhere, using some equipment, and this could be the Collaboration Station or something like it. When everyone is using a collaboration station, then these 'physical' versions become less needed.

Person-Centric Collaboration

A fundamental principle of collaboration is that it is person-centric. I.e. the important thing about collaboration is who you collaborated with, not which tool you used, or the project plan, or the record of the most recent meeting although these things are important.

Few people are able to label one kind of computing person-centric or not, although the distinction is pretty simple:

In person-centric computing, the primary objects you deal with are objects or icons representing people.

So if you want to see someone's phone number, you click on the person icon and it rolls over or something to reveal the business card containing the phone number. Maybe then you can click-to-dial.

If you want to email someone, you click on some email action button on their business card.

Or equally you can maybe drag the person icon onto a telephone, or drag a telephone onto the person icon.

On my 'Collaboration Station', you establish a collaborative 'conversation with a person by dragging that person's icon into an area on your desktop representing your office or meeting room.

Please note this is not the way most desktop systems work today (Dec 2010). Today, you choose a tool first, e.g. an email client, open it up to the tool function you want, e.g. the 'write an email' sub-tool, and
then input some identifier representing a person. Developments have taken place to make the desktop more document-centric which is a very good thing, i.e. you drag your document to a tool, and my discussion of person-centric computing has issues similar to that. The dominance of the 'tool' on the Windows desktop is still pretty strong though, i.e. to edit a word document you can drag the document to the 'Word' tool, but not to the 'Excel' tool, and vice-versa for spreadsheets - the system would still work if there was an 'edit' area on the desktop and you could drag either spreadsheets or Word documents to that. This is clearly analagous to the common 'Open' function that is triggered when you double-click a Word or Excel document.

First post on a new blog

I'm accumulating content regarding collaboration tools, and decided it needs a blog to go with it, so this is it.

A particular item is the design of a Collaboration Station, i.e. a consideration of appropriate tools, somehow integrated on the desktop, aimed at making interpersonal collaboration as productive as possible.