FileView

“ Another way to access your attachments more efficiently in Mail2000. ”

Sometimes, it’s rather annoyed by how to find your messages or attachment in your Email because your mail would get more and more complex as time goes on. Since Mail2000 users always check mails and files in an 8-hour workday, we provided a simpler way for them to access attachments in Mail2000. We expect not only to improve the proficiency of finding attachment, but to increase the productivity of work.

my role

In FileView project I was responsible for research, ideation, UI design, and usability testing, partnered with one PM and one engineer.

Lead everyone to realize our user. I conducted several interview for collecting data of users' behaviours and their context and presented to every partner to make sure all of us had an identical domain knowledge toward the target user before we started to make any solution.

Verify and Refinement. Since the member of this project was rahter simple, I recommended a method of usability (called RITE), we conducted a series of intensive usability testing to determine how target users interact with FileView when the development phase began. I used several shorter circles and recruited participants to help us find and verify problems. In addition, I also help some front-end job, such as modified the style (CSS) of FileView UI during the development phase.

dicovery

To strengthen ours domain knowledge of Mail2000, we conducted a series of In-depth interviews among 10 Mail2000 users (9 Taiwanese in A company and 1 Japanese in B company) to find out about their context.

"We focues on obeserving users' behaviour at first becouse that would help us get more cues based on facts quickly, then extended to their scenarios inclusive of many objects or interactions, finally, their attitudes toward whole Mail2000."

Fig. 1 Record of Interview

Except for composing and reading mail, while using Mail2000 (webmail) in PC, these users always “manage their mail folder” (to put the right mail into the right folder) and “find”. We hightlighted some common attributes of what we learned from them:

Behaviour

• Always communicating with external contact every workday.
• Categorise their mail into To-do or DONE in many ways, and precisely classify their mail. (by project, person, team, and so on)
• They download attachment either when going to edit current file immediately, or concerning that preview might show a distort document.
• Heaps of mails. Because they never delete their mails. (except for spam)

Attitude

• Mail2000 is the only place where always keeping theirs the purest and newest attachment, especially when they found nothing in local folders.
• Categorise their mail into To-do or DONE in many ways, and precisely classify their mail. (by project, person, team, and so on)
• Occasionally, it’s quite hard to find mails out for them, especially attachment, and not just concerns of performance.

In order to realize the context of searching thoroughly, I conducted a brief one-on-one usability testing with think aloud method among 7 participants.

Fig. 2 Context of Find attachment

Task: Access a particular attachment. (a sales report PDF)

We found there are two patterns of behaviour:

Recall and type keyword. Two partipants even couldn’t sure if they received this mail before, so they tried some keywords first. (green line)

Exploring. Five of them knew that mail, the goal became simpler for them: Shift into the right folder (their context looks , just changing viewing mode. (blue line)

The fact is, it’s quite hard for participants to type even one keyword to search for lacking of retrieval cues, on the other hand, it tends to make participants losing their way when catching the wrong memory at the beginning.

insight

What is the mental model like when they are going to find something in Mail2000? Obviously, Sender, Subject, and Content (file or mail) are the top 3 cues that users try to recall before actions because of lacking variety of memory.

Fig. 3 Touchpoint in user's context
Note: Clear and Vague means the memory of the whole thing.

Design

We developed some concepts, such as,

• Display all attachements of the current folder.
• Provide useful information (Subject, Sender, Receiver, Date) to support recognition.
• Quickly switch between "MailView" and "FileView".
• Minimise learning, following the present UI pattern of Mail2000.

Fig. 4 MailView ⇔　FileView (Concept of FileView)

Fig. 5 MailView ⇔　FileView (Prototype Version I of FileView)

Iteration of Usability Testing. In order to validate whether this concept would meet user needs as rapidly as possible, we decided to implement user test (and of course we had some issue identified prior to the test.)

"RITE method" We implemented a series of usability testing differing from those of ordinary usability testing. We focused on iterating the circle of finding the problems rapidly and fixing them. We recruited 7 participants who were 8 aged 28 to 36 years old. Some of them were received usability testing before during pilot study mentioned above (inclusive of 1 Japanese).

In the first 3 runs (iterations), many flaws came to light. We found 13 issues during the usability testing, and hightlighted some of thems as follows:

Fig. 6 Usability Record

Fig. 7 unfriendly gazing path

Where is the entry? The result showed there was lack of indication, so that the participant even did not notice the Entry of any flow which would leads her to use FileView.

I need more information. On the other hand, in Run 2 the participant seems quite tired were overwhelmed when looking at when browsing FileView because horizontal gazing path would be too long depends on the display (look at filename on the left side then look at the mail subject on the right side), besides, those main elements such as subject, sender, date, content would somewhat important for user when making decision.

Can I narrow down by keyword? Actually, keyword is also an option that user can classify and narrow down what they are looking at. (Note: Even though it could be a wrong hint.)

Fig. 8 Process of usability testing

After four iterations, we clarified our concept and fixed some usability issues:

• Esay to access an attachment.
• Through browsing FileView, user could find a particular attachment quickly by recognizing.
• Adding icons to represent each type of attachment and providing useful filters would make much easier when recognizing.

Refinement

Fig. 9 Flow of FileView (Concept of FileView)

From Figure 9, it can be seen that users can easily reach to the entry of FileView whichever flow they from.

Fig. 10 General entrys of FileView

Fig. 11 The entry of FileView when users query and look at the SERP.

Fig. 12 Prototype of early phase (Concept of FileView)

Internal Release

Even thought we've already believed that somewhat they probably would need more filters which can narrow down the content, such as "File Type", "Keyword search". We still decided to release current version as an internal version let more colleagues use it after we fixed almost critical issues.

" I was uninterested even doubted whether user would need FileView until I was asked to check which one is the lastest attachment I sent to our client. Definitely, just one click then I can filter out all messages (a huge mail thread) and check files by browsing."

" May I share my success story? "

─ PM member

" I feel I can control Mail2000 more effeciently than ever before. And I would like to manage my attachments in mail folder as those files in my Local folder. In addtion, if there were a keyword search would be better, I think. "

─ Sales member

It was indicated that there were 25 colleagues access FileView from access log during 15 days, some of them access more than 3 times on different days. I conducted a group interview to gain their opinions, feeling, and experience.

Fig. 13 Access log of one of the informant during internal release

Subsequently, we build several filter features that can filter out all but the files you're interested in seeing.

Fig. 14 Final of FileView (Concept of FileView)

What I learned

Actually we had a lot of challenges during the FileView project, and in research phase I used to be asked such as,

" Why don't you improve you search module?　For instance, AND search. "

In order to answer this question, I must to realize how users finds their attachments. I implemented lots of usability testing with different complexity of the target. We found there were several cues when retrieving, and the name of attachment is the most difficult cue to recall because of variable.

There are two path of context I've mentioned above, if user remember any cue they type keyword then they started to search, but inevitably get annoyed due to they must to visit each mail with attachment; in the other hands, if the memory is vague, they could even go to a wrong SERP, let alone find an attachment.

In these scenarios, user needs indeed are: 1. easy to aceess their files, 2. Narrow down content by correct index generated from database and activate their memory.