Change of concept

In our early concept named Rankr the idea was to filter and rank incoming streams of messages in an automated way so the user can process these in an efficient way. Because the system takes the burden of filtering and ranking from the user we thought this should be the key idea to base our application upon. At first it sounded great on paper, very efficient once it's realized and fully functional. But relying on this kind of automated system is also very optimistic in the sense that we expect it to filter streams just the way the user expects it to be. Clearly with the current technology this can be done to some extent but it also has many flaws and weaknesses. Such a weakness can be the system filtering messages, based on some criteria given by user, and putting them in places where they are not meant to be. This undesirable effect can cause loss of messages. So we decided not to use any form of automated filtering or ranking.

Another issue with the current concept is that we make use of folder, a rather old concept that already has some interesting alternativesIn our first system the user could place messages in folders to organize them. Messages would remain in these folders until they are removed or archived. This form of clustering messages works well but usually from the experience we got over many years users don't often go back and check these folders for messages. So they remain unread or forgotten most of the time. Clearly we need some innovative way of clustering messages instead which will be explained in our next blog post.
The most important reason why we needed to change our concept is that the system should be user controlled instead of automated system. Therefore we had to change our concept in such a way that user can efficiently process incoming streams without the system making any decisions for the user. The user should be able to read and place messages without to much effort or time. So user time and effort are the key points in our new concept. Our new concept will really be a tool to process a lot of feeds in a short time. It will act like a feed eater, so we name it Featr.


After taking these in consideration we changed our design accordingly. So we have come up with the following design.

Figure 1: New design

We'll now explain different parts in figure 1.

1. Sidebar for organizing messages: lets the user organize messages very efficiently by either selecting messages and clicking on the desired day or action(trash, archive, spam) or simply dragging and dropping. The idea was that the users gets all his new messages from the streams he selected in the NEW-tab. In this tab, he can archive or delete messages, or drag them to the day he wants to handle them. When the user wants to handle the message in more than a week from now, he needs to drag it to the ‘week+’-bar. The tabs the user needs to drag the messages to are located on the left of the screen. He can also select different messages and handle all of them together. Every day is divided using some user-defined deadlines. For example when it’s Tuesday and you want  message to be processed tomorrow after work, you drag it to Wednesday and a window appears with to possible deadlines. The user can then drag the message to ‘after work’.

2. New and Processed tab bar: allows the user to view new messages or messages that are already organized. The "New" tab shows all the new messages according to chronological order while "Processed" tab shows organized messages. Once the user has processed all his messages, he can click on the "Processed" tab and for example select Wednesday after work. Then all the messages he needs to deal with Wednesday before leaving the workplace are shown, including the message he just processed. The user also has the possibility to rank the messages by dragging the most important messages to the upper-left corner of the screen. The messages are coloured from red (most important) to yellow (least important).

3. Search bar: lets the user search for messages. If the user desires to find more specific messages he can do so by clicking on "Advanced search" which gives him/her more options.

4. Logout and options: lets the users logout and configure his/her settings.

5. Sources: lets the user add more message sources or filter messages based on chosen sources. "Select all" chooses all sources and shows all messages on the screen. At this moment the possibilities are Twitter, mail, Facebook, Google+, Toledo, Youtube, RSS-feeds and Yammer. These streams (and the user-defined deadlines as described in 1) can be configured at the ‘configuration’-button at the upper-right corner.

6. Messages: is the actual part of our ui where the user can see/read his messages. On one screen a maximum of 16 messages can be shown. When there are more messages, the user can scroll down.


This initial design gave us chance to perform some user tests that ultimately brought things to light we didn't see at first. Therefore we needed to change it further to fulfil the users' needs.


We will be talking about our new more user centric concept in detail in our next blog post.