Rethinking Email Information Visualization: a case study

Abstract

How many times has the phrase "An image's worth a thousand words" been used in the daily life? Indeed, a graphical representation of anything that surrounds us is much better assimilated by the human brain rather than a textual representation, because the vision is the sense that carries more information and faster to the brain. Therefore, this principle may be applied to anything, namely, in a scientific area where scientists have to deal with large sets of data. This datasets were visualized in a less capable way until a few years ago when the area of Information Visualization started to emerge and alerting the specialists to the fact that, with a set of techniques of principles, the cognitive process of acquiring information can be facilitated in such a way that the user can acquire more information and get a better insight over the data he's visualizing at the same time that the effort to perform this task is reduced. The aforementioned science, Information Visualization, can be applied to any field of study. And a particular field who can be tremendously improved with this relation is the email environment. As it is widely known, the email use is massified and it's one of the most used means of communication within several contexts. Still, besides this massification, the structure of email is still the same as it was 40 years ago. This points to a need of improving this system, analyzing first what are the actions that users execute, what are the user's needs and then adapting the email to the modern user. This dissertation is going to have three distinct parts being them, at first a description of this still not mainstream science that is Information Visualization, next present the results of a research over the email environment, pointing to which are its main gaps and the new features that users associate to it and finally, mix the two previous topics - using information visualization techniques to solve a subset, suited for this dissertation's timeframe, of email's problems - trying to achieve a solution that pushes the email system forward in the direction of making the use of the email, once again, a pleasant experience to the user, having a real email client - that's currently under development - as a case study so that all the work here developed can be validated in a real life scenario, with real users, having feedback and with that improve the prototypes meeting that way the users' needs.