Reply detail view

Status Throwing out proposals for engineering feedback.

• Goals in order of importance

1. Easy to implement
2. Plays nice with other clients and the ways they handle visualizing threads
3. Improves on the user's ability to understand the structure and direction of the conversation
4. Improves on the user's ability to distinguish who the key contributors are to the conversation
5. Make the final visualization of a thread actually usable. (As in the user doesn't have to go back to the original messages to understand how the conversation flowed.)

• Problems with current visualization schemes
• Visual clutter. Too many >>>s or too many lines.
• Hard to string together messages that have been broken a part by in-line comments
• Hard to distinguish between groups of in-line comments
• In-line comments are not labeled wrt who made the comment, which gets confusing as the conversation gets structurally complicated.
• Hard to discern structure from the conversation.
  • Who are the key contributors?
  • What is the original topic of the conversation?
  • What are the key comments and responses?

Proposals

• Lines
• Most similar to the way Apple Mail formats their threads
• Lines replace >>>s
• Lines are only colored next to relevant text. Otherwise they are light grey.
• Colors are consistently matched to the contributor. (ie. All message text from Katie is green.)
• Reply.gif:
  

• Annotated in-line comments
• No visualization of conversation structure
• Messages are tagged with a colored bullet and a tagline explaining when the message was sent and who sent it
• Colors are consistently matched to the contributor. (ie. All message text from Katie is green.)
• In-line comments are tagged and colored by who the contributor is.
• Reply_alternate.gif:
  

• Alpha4_Toolbar.gif:
  

• OriginalMsg^?.gif:
  
• Reply.gif:
  

• ReplyAll^?.gif:
  

• Forward.gif: