Visualizing Email Conversations and Related Web Resources

In this note we explore the design of small visual images to represent email conversations about a particular web resource. A working system has been integrated within an Internet browser. While users navigate the web, it searches and displays relevant conversations from their personal email store, providing a visual summary via a thumbnail which depicts conversational participants and message flow along with related web pages and their relevance. Preliminary user studies show our visualizations of participants and related resources were more easily understood than the messaging display. Small image thumbnails have frequently proven to be convenient surrogates for larger pictures and we hope small conversational thumbnails may prove similarly beneficial for email conversations and related web resources.