Interaction Design — All In One EMAIL

Problem:

Just about everyone’s Inbox is overflowing with emails. Some are important to you; some are more of a “For Your Information” and some have no value and you don’t understand why you are on the email thread at all. We create rules to help organize but unless you keep updating your rules when you start new projects, you inbox becomes a mess again. Like most people, we have more than one email account so there are times where we don’t know which email account has what email and the need to duplicate the rules for each account.

So how can we keep our inboxes clear and remove the unwanted clutter while keeping the important threads on top and getting to all those important emails no matter which account it’s in.

Prototype Idea:

Overall there is no easy way to keep ones inboxes clean or remove the unwanted clutter without some planning but we can consolidate all your emails in one place where you can create the rules that apply to all email accounts. So regardless of which email account it came from you can keep all the important emails together without needing to search multiple email accounts. Replies would be sent bases on the email account and one can select the originator when creating a new email.

Original Design:

This was the original concept of having multiple folders, where you can sort the order of the folder and all non-ruled emails would be stored in “Default”.

Iteration One:

User feedback was didn’t know what “Default” meant, missing other folders like “Sent”, “Trash”, “Junk”. Also there was no sorting. Some commented that the “Inbox” should always be first and the spaces in between each folder was a waste.

Iteration Two:

Original design was to only allowed one folder to be opened at a time, while the alternative design was to allow multiple folders to be opened. This was better especially, when one wanted to move or delete emails from multiple folders. We also included the ability to allow the user to define the sort pattern for each folder.

Final Iteration:

The final iteration was to have multiple action buttons under each folder instead of a static one at the bottom and only to enable them when any email was selected. Also we remember what folder was opened so we can restore the setting after any operations. By default, the Inbox folder is opened.