Mail; its a part and parcel of our life and has been with us almost from the time being in one form or the other. If we consider what a mail does in its most crude from; its the communication of information from one person to another. As such with digital mail platforms like twitter, facebook, RSS feed are essentially doing that same job.
But somehow with all these platforms it has become somewhat tedious and time consuming to do a simple thing; read your mail. Of course each platform brings with it, its own style of communicating messages. But there must be some way to bring it all at one place and communicate in such a way that there is less noise from every perspective, so that people can just focus on content.
I had one simple idea around which maybe we can redesign the way people handle their mail -
Every mail has only two important parts which are of interest to user when he is checking his mails -
1. FROM - Who has sent me the mail?
2. MESSAGE. - What does it say?
Think of yourself; when you are checking up on your mail you generally worry the most about these two things; you are not really thinking about its details immediately like who are the rest of people on email, when did it come etc. Maybe you want them, but that tendency is most when you want to spend time on that mail.
Taking this idea we can have two fresh ideas on which mail can be restructured -
Multiple platforms can be united at a central location.
The above logic applies to any mail, be it the tweet, FB post, RSS feed item or an email. So why can't we club them together at a central place and manage.
Simplify the presentation
Since there are only two important things for the user as he is checking the mail, why can't we just show that. Every next set of details or the actions should be presented at the next level of interaction i.e when he opens the mail.
Here's a mockup below showing as to how should a design look like with the above ideas implemented.
The mockup is annotated by points which are important. Lets discuss them one by one.
1. The idea is to present mails from one platform at a time since the purpose and frequency of mails is different from each account.
2. As discussed, we just show only the two most important things, "from" and "message summary". Also an unread mail is separated from a read one by a clear background color.
3. The next set of actions are displayed once a user opens the mail. All the actions (reply,favorite,delete and details) are displayed as buttons which is generally the next intent of user when he opens a mail.
4. The intention here is to redesign the way the time/date of incoming mail. You never really notice the time on every item when you are checking mail but would generally like to know what are my today's mail. Clubbing the mail by day tries to address that.
This is a just high level idea that I have discussed here. Digital mail comes with its own set of complexities especially with the multiple platforms we are trying to support. But working on the objectives of minimalism and the human approach towards reading mail, there is a certain possibility of handling mails in a more wholesome fashion.
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