Authors:
Saad Alharbi
and
Dimitrios Rigas
Affiliation:
University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Keyword(s):
Effectiveness, Efficiency, E-mail, Experiment, Information hiding, Usability, Visualisation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Human Factors
;
Human-Computer Interaction
;
Internet HCI: Web Interfaces and Usability
;
Multimedia Systems
;
Physiological Computing Systems
Abstract:
As the number of e-mail accounts and messages grow rapidly, traditional e-mail clients that are used nowadays have become difficult to use. Therefore, this paper shows how the usability of e-mail clients can be improved using information visualisation. An experimental e-mail visualisation tool was developed in order to organise e-mail messages in the inbox. It visualises messages based on the date of receiving messages with senders’ e-mail addresses. An experiment was carried out to test whether information visualisation could significantly enhance the usability of e-mail clients. The performance of 30 users was observed in a standard e-mail client and the proposed prototype. The results showed that information visualisation could significantly improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of e-mail clients.