Thread Arcs – IBM Research

Thread Arcs is a fresh interactive visualization technique designed to help people use threads found in email.




“Thread Arcs combine the chronology of messages with the branching tree structure of a conversational thread in a mixed-model visualization that is stable and compact. By quickly scanning and interacting with Thread Arcs, people can see various attributes of conversations and find relevant messages in them easily. We tested this technique against other visualization techniques with users own email in a functional prototype of ReMail, our research group’s experimental email client. Thread Arcs proved an excellent match for the types of threads found in users’ email and the qualities users wanted in small-scale thread visualizations.”





This is a truly interesting visual approach to e-mail threads and even to small sized graphs. This concept is part of a major project developed by the Collaborative User Experience team at IBM Research. ReMail is a research project developed for almost a decade and it aims to understand better how people use e-mail and make the experience more functional and straightforward. Some of its features are very encouraging.



Here’s the link of ReMail Website:

ReMail

Here’s a link to the Thread Arcs paper (pdf) by Bernard Kerr:

Thread Arcs