Summary:
Themail is a tool used to create a visualization of the content of emails between people. Words that are frequently used for long periods of time (yearly words) are displayed as well as words that are frequently used over the course of a month. It can be used to show the progression of a relationship between two people or the timeline of events that have occurred during a person’s life. The researchers sent Themail to participants to be used outside of a lab to get a more natural response. They found that 80% of the participants used Themail to look at the broader visualization of their emails (“ the haystack”) and 20% of the participants used it to look at the more detailed aspects (“the needle”). The participants that used “the haystack” mode tended to look at the relationships between friends and families. Themail was compared by users to photobooks as a way to look back on events. On the other hand, participants that used “the needle” mode were more likely to look at the emails sent between coworkers or ones that were work related.
Reflection:
I thought the visualization Themail used was really interesting but also a bit confusing and chaotic at first glance. Having the yearly words kind of more faint in the background was an odd choice as you would think those words would have more significance if they’ve been used over the course of a year or more. I also really liked that the monthly words were interactive. It would be fun to scan through emails and easily access the original email the word originated from. I also liked the use of spacing to show how long a person went without communicating with the other person. Adding the use of circles to represent the email messages made the different visualizations almost overwhelming. Since the study was done with only 12 participants, I would like to see it done on a larger scale to see if the trends the researchers found still hold true.
Questions:
What would a similar study done on a social media platform (like Facebook Messenger) show?
How would the use of different visualizations change how the users interact with Themail?
