Using Graphical Representations to Improve the Usability of Email Clients

Authors:
Dimitrios Rigas;Saad Alharbi
Affiliations:
Department of Computing, University of Bradford, BD7 1DP, Bradford, UK, D.Rigas@Bradford.ac.uk, S.T.Alharbi@Bradford.ac.uk;Department of Computing, University of Bradford, BD7 1DP, Bradford, UK, D.Rigas@Bradford.ac.uk, S.T.Alharbi@Bradford.ac.uk
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering: Proceedings of the Eighth Joint Conference on Knowledge-Based Software Engineering
Year:
2008

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Abstract

With the versatility of email and the growing number of email messages, email clients have become difficult to use. Information visualization has been employed by many studies for various purposes such as the employment of the management features to email clients. Nevertheless, graphical presentation of email data has not been significantly considered to improve the usability of email clients. This paper describes an empirical study that aimed to investigate whether the usability of email clients can be improved by visualising email data. Two experimental e-mail visualisation approaches were developed especially for this experimental programme, both of them graphically presenting email messages based on a dateline together with other email data. Thirty users were required to perform ten experimental tasks in the two experimental visualisations and in a typical email client. Tasks accomplishment time and number of actions carried out whilst performing the tasks in order to evaluate the usability of each email version. The results indicated that the graphical presentation of email messages can significantly improve the usability of email clients. However, it can also negatively affect the usability if the email data was hidden extensively to reduce the graphical complexity in the inbox.