ABSTRACT. Email and related traditional collaboration applications are some of the few truly ubiquitous and critical forms of communication for business today.
inBOX: Your Future Mail Box Gashaye Mahtemu, Jahnvi Mudgal, Parvathy V R, Rajib Bhakat, VSSS Sri Harsha Andukuri Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Guwahati, Assam, 781 039, India {purcenabasha, jahnvimudgal90, parvathyvr89, bhakatrajiv, sriharsha546}@gmail.com ABSTRACT
Many new mail services are available today and Gmail which made its entry 8 years ago is going strong by gaining a strong base of users. The main popularity of Gmail is due to the fact that we can incorporate all the services offered by Google into it. Now people do not use email unless for formal business communications or for getting promotions from products.
Email and related traditional collaboration applications are some of the few truly ubiquitous and critical forms of communication for business today. Like the telephone, it is hard to imagine a workplace without them. Email, which was designed as a simple one-to-one communication tool, is used today for everything from broadcasting communications to project, information and business process management. The resulting information overload, coupled with the availability of newer social collaboration tools, has highlighted major challenges to the current use cases for email.
CONCEPT
The future email service should be able to integrate all the social media and e commerce seamlessly together with its basic function for exchange of information. But the cluttering and overload of information and data should also be avoided. To avoid the present shortcomings and problems, instead of logging in into an interface we can have a personalized cloud space in the server, with which we can customize according to our needs and choices. The core concepts of our design are:
Despite these challenges, email use is expected to continue growing—but at a slower pace than some of the newer capabilities such as blogs, micro blogging, wikis, social file sharing, social communications and video collaboration. Email will retain relevance as a key business collaboration tool by evolving towards a more integrated approach with these newer interfaces. This evolution into a social email experience takes users to an integrated social environment in which they can switch seamlessly between the right tools for the right tasks.
1) To provide a single gateway for all your social profiles; 2) An integrated personalized virtual space. Solution for this would be to have all our data stored to our personal cloud and integrate our email to this server. Using this futuristic email we should be able to access all our social media and e commerce sites with a single login process.
Author Keywords
Cloud computing, Interface, Domains, Data overload. ACM Classification Keywords
C.2.4 Distributed Systems, H.5.2 User Interfaces.
We can log in to our Cloud Box account and customize other page according to our needs. This enables us to connect with different sites and social platforms according to user definitions. The space in the cloud box can be divided/fragmented into different domains and data can be stored in different domains.
INTRODUCTION
Email can be a professional tool or a kid's play. It can also be a collaborative, more composite platform which forms a personal identity. Email has been used as a medium of long distance communication from the very beginning. But recently with the advent of social media and e-commerce sites the popularity of email has been dwindling (Results of a Survey on the Use of Email, Social Networking and Other Applications,” Oysterman Research, April 2010). But despite its low popularity email is a necessary evil and it will continue to remain in the scenario for many years to come. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. OzCHI’13, November 25 - 29 2013, Adelaide, Australia Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-4503-2525-7/13/11…$15.00.
Figure 1: Interface of cloud box
The figure shown above is the home page of Cloud
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Box in which we have icons linked to various social networking and e-commerce sites which is customizable. The notifications related to them appear as a popup message along with the icon of the site. The mails related to these social networking sites do not go to our inbox and create unnecessary clutter, rather we can see it while accessing the particular site.
present on the Cloud interface. Custom box: The user can define boxes for purposes specific to the user’s needs and point of view.
EMAIL INTERFACE
The futuristic mail we are designing i.e. “inBOX” boasts of an interface which interacts with the user moods. It has 3 modes namely: • Classic • Professional • Entertainment etc. In the classic mode the ‘inBOX” behaves just like our normal mail box where we can see our mails and reply to them.
Figure 2: Interface of cloud box
In the professional mode all our chat windows and social media access just turns off.
These added features which makes the Emailing experience futuristic and simpler.
In the entertainment mode features such as music player, video streaming and all turns up.
CONCLUSIONS
The futuristic email "inBOX" tries to address the problems of the current situation where emails are becoming less popular due to the advent of social media and e-commerce websites, also the whole experience of 'E mail' gets ruined due to inbox getting cluttered by the unwanted default messages received from these websites. The solution would be to convert our email to a single gateway “Cloud Box” where we can access our mails as well as interact with all our social media and share information without any hassle just by tagging and sharing. This can be made possible with the help of cloud computing. The best part about it is that we can customize our own cloud according to our needs. The "inBOX" has various boxes that enable these functions, Also "inbox" provides us with various modes so that the user can use his email in a very interactive way and seamlessly perform different tasks with a unified and integrated networking technique.
The other point “inBOX” focus is on minimalizing the clutter in the interface. Hence it has only a live button to show if you are online or offline. Tag Sharing Files The customized cloud according to the user need will have by default a “Shared box”; where all the documents that we sent are copied in to. Then the person that we want to receive the specific file(s) will be tagged. The “Shared box” is highly secured; it restricts the tagged person from accessing other files and other parts of the personalized cloud. Black Box The “Black Box” is the second default folder where all files will be stored in an encrypted backup mode, which can be safely stored in our cloud and can be accessed by answering security check posts. These two boxes will be accessed once a user is in “inBOX” interface. As we have mentioned in the beginning our aim is to have an integrated personalized virtual space; thus “inBOX” interface is 100% customizable. So a user can use different modes for storing data and mails in different boxes according to the following criteria: People box: For connection to people specifically to your circle and friends. Baby box: For first time E mail senders. Corporate box: It will work in sync with our corporate contacts and work mail. Knowledge box: Mails specifically for our purpose, related to our research and academic interests. Promotional box: Emails which are send from various promotional agencies and advertisements other than
REFERENCES
bhakatrajiv.wordpress.com [online] (2013) Retrieved from http://bhakatrajiv.wordpress.com/ “Results of a Survey on the Use of Email, Social Networking and Other Applications,” Oysterman Research, April 2010. "The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing". National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved 24 July 2010. “The future of email and applications is social” Based on an IBM estimate of 800 million workers using email worldwide, February 2013. www.youtube.com [online] [Retrieved from] http: //www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpag e&v=ZjlLTcuflvw.
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