Thinking Outside the Inbox
Strategies for unlocking the potential of tagging in the email environment

Despite the presence of a variety of sorting and searching tools in the standard email client, users continue to rely primarily on the maintenance of elaborate file structures and the brute force of memory to manage their messages. Both of these tasks are becoming more difficult as the quantity of email increases and the usages of email become more diverse.

Experimental applications that focus on filtering messages along one or more high-level dimensions – thread, task, social relevance – show promise in reducing this difficulty, but these high-level dimensions are each useful in their own way, and focusing on one at the expense of the others does not fully address the findability challenges that confront the modern worker. Today’s office treats email as a major part of the official record, and workers are often required to locate messages quickly with limited amounts of information at their disposal. Categorizing email in such a way that it will be findable from multiple angles is therefore crucial, and yet current filing systems do very little to support this goal.

Tagging systems provide the potential building blocks for a versatile, multi-dimensional categorization system, but the idea of tagging does not come naturally to users with a lifelong familiarity with the hierarchical folder model, and the task of tagging is time-intensive and potentially overwhelming, even to users who understand what they are doing.

My capstone explores ways that the burden of tagging might be reduced through thoughtful interface design, and suggests six strategies that designers should consider when prototyping and building tagging systems in the email environment.