July 11, 2011

Persona, a New Email Client

Persona is an interesting new concept for an email client. Ali Seçkin Karayol, Marco Triverio, and Harsha Vardhan at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design are designing and developing it.1 Persona offers some interesting ideas not commonly found in other mail clients.

I’m not sure how well the conversation/people/attachments modes work in real life, since emails that don’t fit into any of these categories2 make up the majority of the stuff in my inbox. But it’s hard to tell how well it’ll work without actually having used it, and I don’t know how the email I get compares to what other people receive.

It’s certainly good to see fresh approaches to handling email.

  1. Their other videos are also worth checking out. back

  2. Receipts for things I ordered online, notifications from Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, emails from lists I’ve subscribed to, and so on. back

If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/393

designed_for_use_small

If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.

You can find out more about it (and order it directly, printed or as a DRM-free ebook) on the Pragmatic Programmers website. It's been translated to Chinese and Japanese.