Email is a Series of Conversations
Popular email clients generally share the same model of the document metaphor. Users are expected to sift through their inbox, respond to incoming messages, and file or delete the message. However, this immediate, "one-touch" model of usage is does not match the real-world usage patterns of most users; the quantity of incoming messages, the varied responses they demand, and time it takes to compose a response results in an inbox that is full of messages that users can neither respond to nor even read in a timely manner.
At the heart of this problem is the way email clients strive to preserve the inviolability of the single message. Email clients are message-centric. Each and every single message is another document in the great stack, and you as a user are expected to deal with your correspondence in this manner. What I am proposing is a model that is conversation-centric. What I mean by this is that it is useful to think of your inbox as a collection of voices, rather then individual messages. I'm proposing a model where the most recent message is presented as the latest utterance of the sender, who resides in a list of contacts, and whose position in the hierarchy of contacts is determined by the arrival time of their latest message.
To see the value of a voice-centric model, all you need to do is to divide the number of messages in your inbox by the number of senders, or better yet, the number of unique senders regardless of varying email addresses. In my inbox I have a staggering 782 messages of varying status: unread, partially read, fully read, and responded to. Compare that to the number of email addresses they were sent from (245), or better yet, the number of unique senders (216), and now you have 216 voices to monitor rather then 782 messages to keep track of. That?s a reduction of 73%.
Over the next four pages, I will illustrate this model with a redesign of Google's GMail.
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