EzMail: Using information visualization techniques to help manage email.

摘要

Electronic mail has become one of the major communication tools. Email is being used for a wide range of functions such as information management, task management, and document exchange, though it was originally designed simply as an asynchronous communication and messaging application. However, email clients have not progressed correspondingly to support an increasingly growing number of users in dealing with the complexity of email management. Therefore, several studies have focused on exploring the requirements of email users and proposed various solutions to improve the usability of email programs.; This thesis is an investigation of email usages, problems, and solutions. Based on this research, and making use of information visualization methods to help users in structuring and visualizing incoming and outgoing information flows, we have designed EzMail as an email visualization tool that runs in conjunction with an email client and creates a multi-view interface for email. Our primary focus is to group and visualize messages as components of their conversational threads to provide contextual information and conversational history. Our goal is to help email users perform better by getting more information with less effort using EzMail. We have developed visualizations for individual messages, properties of a message, and messages in a thread. We have incorporated the ability to annotate a message and the capability of replying simultaneously to several messages. To validate EzMail's design ideas, we investigated how email users manage their messages, email folders, and conversational threads in a user survey. Following minor improvements resulting from the survey, a user study was designed and carried out to evaluate EzMail compared to Microsoft Outlook. In general, users performed significantly better using EzMail than using Outlook.