[Sigia-l] IBM Reinvents E-mail

[Phil Glatz]

At 01:16 PM 12/10/2003 -0500, Listera wrote:
>Quick, name three fundamental UI advances ever made by IBM. Having a hard 
>time? :-)

Don't discount them too fast - they do a lot of basic research, which 
always doesn't make it first into the mainstream.  I remember using their 
usability guidelines 15 years ago, and exploring "TopView" in the early 
1980s - it was an object-oriented framework for windowing, that came 
between the Mac and the first version of Windows.

>Looks fascinating, misses the point entirely: if your mail
>threads are so convoluted that you need an elaborate visualization tool just
>to follow, there's something fundamentally wrong with the process to begin
>with.

It may never hit the streets in the form shown here, but is the way a lot 
of users conceptualize mail.  As a developer, I suffer the sin of being too 
familiar with the technical tools I use.  I run things like this past my 
wife, who is a very tough sell on technology.  Some of the concepts here 
are exactly the way she'd like to deal with email.

The problem left to be solved, is that users are forced to organize threads 
the way the program wants them to, while ordinary users often have entirely 
different concepts of organization.