Hannover Remixes
I did have a big post planned today in which I was going to announce my new position with Microsoft, working on their new products for the health care market. I had all kinds of good explanations of why I was going to go, and I was just going to provide a few links into what they were doing so far and who I'd be working with. Then when I went to put that together this morning, I realized that nobody would ever believe for the slightest second all the stuff I was writing. There's just no way I would ever get involved with their efforts. It's just too far removed from how I would ever approach the problem.
Gags that are too transparent are never funny. Oh well.
So instead, a non-gag post that I've wanted to start working on for a while. This is the first in a series I'm calling the Hannover Remixes. With Mary Beth's blessing, I'm going to explore some ideas on furthering some of the radical UI changes represented by Notes 8, looking to get even leaner, even cleaner and with some luck, even sexier than the great work we're already seeing from IBM. I'm doing this for 2 reasons: 1) because pure layout & graphics work is a nice creative break from true coding efforts; and 2) I hope to inspire some ideas both in the core Notes dev team and in other Domino developers.
The first remix touches on the recent poll about the "to-ness" indicators in Notes 7 & 8 that Margo wrote about on Mary Beth's blog. I suggested there that the mail close/open icon on the left side should be merged with the "to-ness", since I think that first column is entirely redundant and therefore not particularly useful.
Here's the original as it appears in my mail...
(note that I moved the chevrons over to the left -- that's a drag and drop gesture on the column in the regular client, people. Let's not complain about the sequencing.)
Here's my new version, with updated icons that merge the "to-ness" concept...
(note that the attachment icons on the right are repeated just because of a graphics artifact.)
All the READ mails use the same icon, for the simple reason that "to-ness" seems relevant in determining what to act on now. Unreads use the following indicators...
| Unread, addressed directly To you. |
| Unread, you are part of a group in the To field. |
| Unread, you are directly CCed. |
| Unread, you are part of a group in the CC field. |
| Unread, you are directly BCCed. |
| Unread, this is a bulk email. |
I actually created a set for read mails, but I find them too visually complicated.
The idea here is that the CC's are "ghosts". I'm not 100% happy with the specific overall graphics, but I think this at least conveys the general sense. A little larger an icon (22x22) would help with the distinction, I think, and I could definitely improve on the "group" representation. But still, it's a decent first effort, and at least expresses why I think the two columns should just be one.
I'm honestly not sure the read graphics is even that good an idea. Here's what it looks like if you remove them altogether...
Thoughts?
Comments
Posted by Keil Wilson At 05:15:56 PM On 04/02/2007 |
Posted by Keil Wilson At 04:59:00 PM On 04/02/2007 |
Having a single person icon mean an email was sent only to you is good. Having two or more people would mean that you're one of several recipients. But I agree with @4 that the ghost icon seems more appropriate for BCC (the secret agent guy always makes me think of something private, which is actually not the case in BCC). Maybe for the CC field, you could have a person (or people) with cloned copies fading into the background (to represent copies), kind of like the expand all-collapse all icons on the Notes toolbars?
Posted by Keil Wilson At 05:17:34 PM On 04/02/2007 |
As sort of a general question - why have the read/unread envelope? I know it takes the place of the red star in the basic client, so this is related to that too. The text in the view is already going to be bold (in Standard) or red (in Basic), so the icons are rather redundant. Maybe it's just me, though...
Posted by Chris Whisonant At 11:16:35 AM On 04/02/2007 |
@4 - I can see why the ghost idea might seem like the BCC. The BCC is actually a "man in black" type icon, but the smallness of the icon prevents it from being clear.
Maybe I'll do a full screenshot of the mail with this technique, because I'd actually ALSO show an indicator icon, larger, in the header of the message. So picture when you open a BCC message, a large "Secret Service" type on the right-hand side of the header. This could associate the mneumonic for the view continuously for the user.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 07:31:03 AM On 04/02/2007 |
Posted by Mary Beth Raven At 08:30:31 AM On 04/02/2007 |
I prefer having a read icon for the mail rather than nothing. I'd also like to see what it looks like with the "to-ness" over the read icon. If your scanning back over old mails that could be relevant again. As for the icon images themselves, my instant feeling was that the ghost was for bcc.
Posted by Kerr At 05:39:53 AM On 04/02/2007 |
My gut is that the first time IBM is willing to look at changes to the mail file will be NDNext ... not 8.0.1.
Nicely Done Sir
Posted by John Head At 08:00:51 PM On 04/01/2007 |
Makes me wonder though, shouldn't users design their own inbox, rather like their home page?
Posted by Colin Macdonald At 11:22:54 AM On 04/01/2007 |
Posted by Phil West At 03:55:51 PM On 04/01/2007 |