Reinventing E-Mail

Lotusphere, like every conference we’ve been to for the last six months, has been smaller in size than in previous years, but no one can beat Lotusphere for enthusiasm.  In this case, the Lotus aficionados who made the effort to attend were well rewarded, with a preview of Release 6.0 of Notes and Domino and announcements on a number of changes.

But the icing on the cake at the opening day General Session was for many (certainly for me), a set of technology demonstrations from the IBM labs incorporating a number of interface and email filtering ideas in intellectually appealing ways.  Everywhere I went I heard developers and analysts referring to this demo – and eagerly speculating on just when some of these interesting ideas might find their way into shipping products.

In the IBM Research Lab at Lotusphere the idea is to share “prototypes and design concepts that preview the future of collaboration.” (Lotusphere always features a number of labs where visitors can see demos and meet with developers and researchers.)

It turns out that the on-stage Reinventing Email demo actually combined several of the IBM Research Lab projects. 

	Incoming messages could be delivered to the main inbox or to topically labeled boxes that accepted their messages based on defaults or user-written rules.  For example, everything from a particular person or group or everything about a particular topic or project could go to a special mail box.  For added convenience, Important mail boxes were grouped in the upper right and might offer special alerting features (sounds or visual signals), while mail boxes designed to receive messages with little or no time value (newsletters, copies of company manuals, etc.) were grouped at the bottom left.
	A folding calendar was conveniently placed along the left margin of the screen.  It displayed both the user’s personal calendar and an overlaid (when desired) group calendar, so meetings could be more easily scheduled.
	Other information about collaboration or propinquity could also be displayed.  Color was used as an indicator (not colors that I would pick, but this is, after all, a prototype, not a finished product).  An abstract about this topic is available at www.research.ibm.com/ at the search “Reinventing Email.”

As users spend more and more of their day in the Email system – or in some combination of their Email system and their corporate portal (in which the Email is embedded as a service), finding better ways of managing the increasing volumes of Email has reached a crisis pitch.  This type of filtering (especially if it can be achieved by simple defaults rather than by expecting users to build complex rules) offers the hope of more productive users.

At the same time, we need to be thinking of improved interface design.  There is nothing sacred about the overlapping windows/pulldown menus/pointer interface of Xerox, Apple, and Windows; it’s just very old.  Browsers interfaces are newer, but hard to use for complex, multi-level tasks.  Innovation and user-oriented thinking are required to create new interfaces that are very intuitive, extremely supportive, and offer the ability to perform function at every level, from the basics to rich and complex.  Lotusphere and IBM’s researchers offered us a glimpse into some of the exciting possibilities of that new world. 

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