Summary
The article begins by describing email and the researchers’ past work with creating visualization for user’s email conversations. One particularly interesting part is how they mention that most people save all their emails, so this works great when doing research on the topic because there is plenty of data. The actual project they have created is called Themail, a visualization of a user’s email archive, they also performed research and found two prevalent themes among user reactions, the needle and the haystack. Themail is set up as an interface that shows columns of words that are visually changed based on how much they are used as well as their distinctiveness in compared to other conversations, so bigger words are used often and uniquely in that particular conversation over time. Gaps between the columns indicate periods of time where no conversation occurred. The columns were also separated into two categories, yearly and monthly words. Yearly words provided a broad overview of a relationship between two people over a large period of time, while monthly words indicate snapshots of events that occurred between those people. In the end it was found that the users they showed the application to, generally enjoyed using it and would like to have it integrated with their email client. Of the two modes, needle and haystack, many users liked to use the haystack mode. The haystack mode was the general use where you get to look at how your whole conversation with someone changed over time. A smaller number of people liked the needle mode, where you can look for specific words and find where they were said in that conversation. Overall, Themail was a successful experiment in the visualization of data.
Reflection
I think this was an interesting read because I like to read about how people go about implementing software. I also feel like it would be useful to have a piece of software that performs these functions. I especially would like to have the search feature, there have been a lot of times where I would need to find when a particular conversation happened. I don’t know how much use I would get out of the “haystack” portrait feature because most of my emails are for business or school and I don’t really have a lot of emotional emails to look back on, as that is what texting is for. The creators of the application definitely had a creative way to visualize the data though, as all the properties like word size and blank space are easily picked out from the visualization, and it is certainly clear what they represent. Visualization and user experience are fundamental when designing any kind of user application, this article represents that and also makes it more clear that our project needs to uphold these tenants in our design. However it is difficult to do this without user input, which is what the developers of Themail saw after users pointed out problems in the weight given to words in certain phrases.
Questions
- How could you go about visualizing people’s text message conversations? Would it be similar or significantly different?
- Why do you think more people enjoyed the “haystack” aspect of the program?
- Is there an alternative design for Themail that could be more effective?
