[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] What are Attachments?
Should links inside emails be considered attachments? In the technical sense of an email (like rfc 2183) links wouldn’t be considered a different content type. The question isn’t whether they are technically attachments as much as if they should be attachment-like in the user interface.
Facebook handles links in a message almost like an attachment-object and will do some additional meta work on the link to provide a default photo and short description for it.
In the message list view Facebook offers an icon to note that a link attachment was included in a messages.
In the composition view Facebook also grabs links from inside the message and shows them separately as an attachment like thing. In the screenshot below the composition window grabbed the link inside my message and pulled down a description and number of photos from the site.
link detected in the composition area
This kind of meta data around a link can be really beneficial. The presentation of the link is better than a person naturally would and since it’s the information is retrieved automatically it only takes extra seconds to make sure a good image and description appear.
Beyond just the benefits of better presentation is another hot topic in the Thunderbird world of offline support. When reading mails offline it’s far better to have a more context about the link than none at all. Even if I can’t bring up the link in an offline state the image, description and comment can help me to recall what the link is about.
Gmail
When you’re using the rich editor for composing a message in Gmail and create a link it has some nice features for recognizing a link and helping you edit it. Here are some screen shots of what Gmail is doing right now.
Popup indicates the link has been recognized in compose window
Editing a Link
Alternatively Editing an Email link
Pretty straightforward and simple stuff when compared to the extra things Facebook is doing. Gmail doesn’t add meta-data about the links or make their inclusion visible in the message list.
Links as Attachments
If in Thunderbird we wanted to start treating links more like we treat attachments…
Visual Field of Dreams
Not more baseball…
I’m wondering what is the optimum visual field or display size for reading on a computer screen?
I haven’t been able to find an easy answer to this question for a number of reasons and what I’ve found for research indicates many conflicting studies. One difficulty is that you have to really define what optimum means. Are you optimizing for speed, comprehension, or satisfaction? Also the size of the documents you are reading can change the optimizing factors for presenting it.
So here’s a compilation of research papers that I’ve found related to the Visual Field, Optimum Display Size, whatever you want to call it problem.
The Effects of Line Length on Children and Adults’ Online Reading Performance [ pdf ]
Adults were measured against children in 3 sets of line length for reading time and effective reading score yet no real differences were found. What is interesting is the perceived results, only in adults found the narrow to medium line length (45 - 76 CPL - characters per line) to be preferred when compared to the full length (132 CPL).
The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News [ pdf ]
Twenty college-age students were given news articles to read displaying in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line from a computer monitor. The results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed with no effects for comprehension or satisfaction other than strong preferences for sizes.
The Effect of display size on reading and manipulating electronic text [ pdf ]
An attempt at more meaningful analysis of the effect of window size on reader comprehension and manipulation of “real-world” texts. Participants were given journal articles for comprehension and a software manual for specific information. Indications that screen size does not play a major factor in performance on either task and readers prefer larger screens. (no kidding!)
Reading and skimming from computer screens and books: the paperless office revisited?
Previous research made conclusions from the screens of the 1980s vs. paper, however when comparing against high quality CRTs speed and comprehension are equivalent. However skimming on a CRT is still 41% slower than from a book, reasons for this finding are discussed.
Interface Design and Optimization of Reading of Continuous Text
A fantastic overview of a lot of different research that has taken place with breakdowns of key variable components of each experiment. If you only read one paper this is likely the best one to get a handle on the situation.
Cited in several other papers but I couldn’t track down an available source for this paper.
Please leave comments for other related research articles, I’d love to be able to find more information on this topic.
This is Dialog Invasion!!
Later today I’ll be giving a summit session on UX for Thunderbird. The Thunderbird Dialog Invasion is one of the many topics to cover.
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script><noscript>digg this!</noscript>
All-Star Break
I arrived in Vancouver on Tuesday July 1st after my long adventure across the country. I think all the sun, baseball parks, and driving ran down my system so after my friends left and I got 2 days of work in I spent the weekend sleeping.
 Cleveland Indians |
 Detroit Tigers |
 Chicago White Sox |
 St. Louis Cardinals |
 Kansas City Royals |
 Colorado Rockies |
 Oakland A’s |
 Seattle Mariners |
Eight stadiums in all. An amazing trip, though some places were certainly missed due to timing. I would have loved to see a Cubs game in Chicago as well as a Giants game in San Francisco but the teams weren’t available when we were coming through. Next time.
Vancouver
Is a beautiful place. I seem to have brought nothing but perfect weather with me as everyday but one was sunny and warm. I quickly setup a Canadian SIN (which is similar to an American SSN), a local bank account and spent the last couple of weeks getting settled into to my international digs. I had already prearranged a stay in a temporary apartment which is working out well as it’s right in Yaletown and lets me easily explore the downtown area.
Vancouver has such a mix of different people. Everyday I hear people speaking in a number of different languages, Chinese, German, Russian, and Spanish to name a few I could recognize. Everyday on my walk to and from work I smell someone smoking weed somewhere. And everyday I hear the grinding and pounding noise of construction. Overall somewhat similar to summers in Cambridge.
Experimental Message View
Before I left the states we started work on something I called The Experimental Message View. I’ll post more about it later, but the simplistic goal is to create a new way of interacting with messages and with the required technology change enables others to easily create alternate experiments inside Thunderbird.
Andrew Sutherland has been cranking on the Global Database work with an initial preview, an m-1 trial release (download and install), and even an early visualization.
Paul Rouget has updated his work on the new treeview API which could help us implement richer message lists by changing how we display messages.
Things are coming together quickly.
Where’s Scotty when I need him?
This Scotty, not that Scotty. Yesterday andrew and I were interrupted at the office by a power outage that effected the entire city block around 11am. And again today when I got to the office it was still closed.
At least one downtown building told power will not be restored until 8:00 am Thursday - Latest info on downtown power, traffic, transit
That’s my office! Would have been useful news if they informed me which building it was before I made the trip downtown to find it closed and missed the status call. I still need to pickup a canadian cell phone and it would have been useful to arrive at work more than 5 minutes before the call.
Go West Young Man!
This Thursday I take permanent leave of Boston to make my new home in lovely Vancouver, BC. Boston has been my home for over 4 years now and after growing up in neighboring NH I honestly never thought I’d be back here this long.
Boston Skyline @ 4:45am by StarrGazr License: 
Though it won’t be the place I’ll miss, it’s my friends and I wish they were coming with me. I’ve tried to convince several of them to do that. Why can’t we all live in the same place?
On Tuesday my u-pack boxes arrived and I squeezed in all the possessions I hadn’t thrown out in the last couple weeks and feel are worth bringing across the country. I actually don’t have many of these things even though they add up quickly. On Friday Moose and I will have left Boston on a grand trip across the states.
Moose is too old to fly anymore, he might not even make this trip in the car, not really; he should be fine. But luckily I won’t be alone with a dog who farts a lot as two of my best friends and I are cramming into my little car to catch baseball games on the road as we make our way from one coast to the next. Thus our route isn’t a clear shot from one place to the next.
I will be partially online during the trip, uploading photos of baseball stadiums, cities, arches, and other parks along the way. I also want to keep up with all the changes we’ve got planned, Thunderbird is starting to make so much progress it would be crazy to take too much time off right now.
Vancouver skyline at night by istargazer License: 
Thanks to everyone I’ve met in Boston, all the friends I’ve made. Please come visit me in Vancouver.
You can learn a lot from TV
I used to think that Bill Clinton was the first black president, but of course that loose fact could easily be replaced if we had a real first black president. Until The Colbert Report Threat Down last night revealed a little known fact about the history of the USA; the title has already been taken by Warren Gansta Harding.
That’s it, I’m moving to Canada!
Activity is the new download
So hip, just like silver is the new gold
Last week I began some work on some ideas for a richer, interactive user notification system for Thunderbird.
Status Bar
Currently the status bar acts as one of the only notification systems to the user. However the status bar is a steady stream of temporal plain text messages. The messages are helpful if you understand what they are indicating, otherwise to most people they only convey general activity happening. In general the messages end up lacking meaning because there is too much information running by.
A First Approach
Initially I took an approach of an interactive status bar that looked a little bit like the awesome bar replacing the status bar. Instead of just giving plain text messages we could make richer messages with visualizations.
The linked message could open thunderbird up to the account or message they were referring to. Next is to add some access to status history where people can see a list of what Thunderbird had done and perform actions (like restart) on those past activities.
The New Download
After seeing the amazing work that has been done on the download manager in firefox it seemed like a good second approach to the problem could be to reuse much of what they’ve done.
The download manager in firefox is solving a similar set of problems. We want to allow people to watch the progress of a specific set of (likely asynchronous) activities. We also want to ensure that people can view the list of past activities in case they want to manage them.
Should we continue using a simple text status message? The progress bar included in the status bar gives a visualization for time to complete an action. But do we need to help people visualize what is happening in the background?
And then instead of an inline popup for the history list we open up the download manager window which allows for searching and management of items inside the list.
Nothing is set yet, most likely a final version will be taking bits of both approaches. Still lots of work to go, more comments and ideas are always appreciated!
Standard8 has your name
Obviously after kicking so much ass there was nothing left for mr. banner to do but take names.
What used to be an awkward set of instructions is about to become as simple as a checkbox.
And yes this isn’t quite the feature that gets everyone laid (hopefully at least a couple people get laid). But it’s an excellent intermediary step toward getting some more testing on the Mac OS X System Address Book connection that should be available in the next alpha. Likely in a month or so when Mark is done with your name he will have replaced this system with an even better experience.
What is the connection experience?
It’s well beyond time to be thinking about what it means to have the OS X Address Book connected to Thunderbird. There’s a long road ahead. What is the end game here?
Should all contacts be stored in the System Address Book or the Thunderbird Address Book? Would that kind of change mean something for Windows? What would that mean for Linux?
If we want to sync your contacts with your iPhone or other iAppleDevices then we should be storing our data in the OS X Address Book, however we should also be careful of another systems limitations.
I like to think of the future of the Thunderbird address book as providing an overlay on top of other address book systems like the OS X System Address Book or an LDAP type address book. We want our data to be compatible with those different basic remote and local storage services. However we also want to do more interesting things with your contacts than what most LDAP systems offer.
If I were to steal the look and feel of GNOME Mobile platform diagram (which I like a lot) it might come out looking something like this for the Thunderbird Address Book Overlay. Underneath is a system address book, ldap, or local thunderbird address book providing the basics of storage. Then above that layer is where we can begin doing interesting things with your Thunderbird Address Book. Going beyond just emails and names and perhaps linking with different kinds of accounts your friends have.
You had me at hello
I spent some time on Friday and Monday writing a script to do some analysis of the Enron Email Dataset. I’m working on a new type of message list view for thunderbird, well a whole new layout actually, but for the message view I wanted to have an idea of message size and content.
Email Data
It turns out that decent email data is relatively hard to come by. Because of privacy concerns it’s nearly impossible to have access to a companies email where you can see the full exchange between a number of different people. Luckily the Enron dataset has become publicly available exactly for this kind of research into email problems.
The enron dataset is broken down into directories for many of the people involved and sub-directories of their emails.
The script I wrote is designed to read in email files in the directory and analyze the message body for its content. Then is spurts out the numbers with median and averages computed.
Mail Trends
If you’ve seen Mail Trends, you know that Mihai Parparita analyzed the enron emails for time, size, threading, and people comparisons. If you download the code you can run it against your own email and will likely see some amazing results (someone should pull this into Thunderbird!).
However the information I was looking for was not available in the mail trends analysis. Mail trends analyzes only email headers to create relationship statistics between emails. And while it does have the size of messages in terms of KB I was looking for the size of message in terms of the number of words.
You had me at Hello?
I’ve had this hypothesis or assumption that within the first 2 sentences of an email I can tell what it’s going to be about without reading the rest. Please try this out on your own! Read the first two sentences of any email and take a second to think if you can at least prioritize your response required for the message.
Combine this assumption with the my other assumption that it’s more important for me to process my mails than it is for me to actually read the entirety of any message. I know people are probably thinking, “you should read the whole message”; but in all honesty more than half the messages I get aren’t important to me at all so reading them would just waste time. This second part of my hypothesis stems from ideas like Inbox Zero and GTD where processing all those “things” is the most important part to being productive.
45 is Median Number of Words Per Message
Analyzing all those emails gave a bit of a statistics problem. On average it turned out to be something like 120 words per message. This high average number came from a few outliers of 500+ word messages that were skewing the results towards the high end, when the numbers should really be reflecting the low end where more results were present. So on average the median number of words per email message was 45. That’s the average of all the medians… rounded. Probably should have just included the standard deviation and called it quits.
I didn’t analyze the kinds of words or their length, which would be something else that’s pretty interesting to know. A next step could be to simply analyze the number of characters per message, that could give interesting hints on how to display the message in it’s entirety.
Back to the Message List View
Here’s a rough breakdown of what GMail gives me when I look at any given message. It’s just enough to understand who this message is from and what it’s probably about.
It’s possible with the [x] checkbox and the actions menu that I could process this mail and move on. However usually I end up opening every message to make sure there’s nothing else I should see. I’m not sure if that’s because I really need to read the rest of the message or what.
So my question continues to be this: Given a little bit more of the message itself, or a little bit more of the context of the message… is there a better way for me to process my emails? I have some mockups and ideas on how I think it could be done, but they need more refining. Will post soon.
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