Evaluating a Personal Communication Tool: Sidebar

By more closely integrating email with the web we aim to bring organization to email and more collaboration to the web. To this end we developed the Sidebar, a web-browser plug which displays email messages which link to the currently displayed URL. We conducted longitudinal studies on two versions of Sidebar to observe the usage of Sidebar and determine if it improves communications productivity. We found that providing an email summary in Sidebar resulted in raised awareness of the email collaborations, increased serendipitous discovery of information, and resulted in higher reported communication productivity. This paper summarizes Sidebar's operation, describes the user studies, and presents conclusions.