Graphical Browsing of Email Data: An Empirical Investigation

This paper presents a comparative usability experiment that was performed to test whether information visualization could improve the usability of email clients. An experimental email visualization prototype called LinearVis was developed in order to organize email messages in the inbox. It visualizes messages based on the date of receiving messages with senders´ e-mail addresses. The performance of 30 participants was observed in a standard email client and the proposed prototype. The results showed that information visualization could significantly reduce the time taken for completing tasks as well as the number of actions performed during performing tasks.