Hello, World: Meet Xobni

This is the first of a three-part series on the Xobni launch. Come back on Thursday to check out Part II of the story. This series was co-written with Marie Baca.

Every day, millions of people are forced to deal with the inefficiencies of Outlook. Almost 50,000 people have tried the early versions of Xobni's private beta. Today, we are opening the floodgates and allowing anyone to download a beta version of Xobni's eponymous product for free.

You can read our official announcement here. The New York Times details our launch in this article.

I've devoted this post to explaining why we built Xobni's software the way we did. The other posts in this series will document the journey up to the launch.

Email Overload

Experts say that there are two types of email users: Cleaners and Keepers. Cleaners receive only a few emails a day, and they meticulously file each email into a specific folder. Keepers, on the other hand, receive copious amounts of email, and although they may start out with a good organizational system, it is quickly abandoned. We designed Xobni for the Keepers — the everyday people who need a product that will help navigate their flooded inbox.

The average Xobni user deals with a whopping 30,000 stored emails and communicate with some 1,900 people. For many, this means sifting through several hundred messages every day. It’s only going to get worse: the Radicati Group estimates that by 2009, people will spend up to 41% of their workday dealing with emails. We are experiencing bona fide email overload, and the challenge for us "power users" is to find a way to process and organize large volumes of information over a short period of time.

A People-Focused System

One of the key insights the Xobni team had early on is that users think about email in terms of people and relationships, not abstract tasks. For example, think about the last time you went hunting through your inbox for an attachment. What was the subject line of that email? Can’t remember? Well, what about the name of the person who sent it to you? I bet that you were able to recall that bit of information far more easily. Indeed, the majority of searches inside email clients are for names of people, and it’s those same names that help us identify the relative importance of a particular message. It’s this idea of a people-centered email system that drove nearly every aspect of our development process.

A Smarter System

Let’s take a look at a few of Xobni's features and discuss the rationale behind them.

1. Super-fast email search. Other than acting as a holding pen for messages, one of the most important functions an email client can perform is allowing the user to quickly search through your emails to find the information they’re looking for. It's such a fundamental need, and yet Outlook’s search is often painfully slow. That’s why we designed Xobni with as-you-type search, so that as soon as you’ve typed "Jan," Xobni has already pulled up all the emails from Jane Smith, as well as all the emails where she is mentioned.
2. Threaded Conversations. Research indicates that one of the biggest problems people experience with their email systems is being unable to put their messages into context. In a standard inbox, messages are sorted by arrival time, which adds very little meaning to what is being said in the body text. Gmail has an effective method for grouping emails, and with the advent of Xobni, Outlook will also have this ability.
3. A Built-In Social Network. Just as it is easier to remember who sent you a message than it is to remember the subject line of a particular email, it's much easier to recall relationships between people than it is to remember a name. For example, one of our investor's names is Rob. I can never remember the name of Rob's assistant (sorry, Carly!). For this reason, we designed Xobni to analyze emails and automatically create a network of relationships around each contact. Now when I pull up Rob's name, Carly's name appears on his list of related people, and I can call or email her with the click of a button.

Research vs. Reality

If you take a look at the research that has been done to improve the usability and usefulness of email clients, you'll find that a lot of the work was performed at Microsoft Research. But these ideas haven’t yet made it into Outlook. It's difficult to change Outlook because the improvements have to be compatible with all of the previous versions of the software. Meanwhile, rebels like us are free to build the next generation of email clients, making them faster, smarter, and easier to use.

Be sure to check back next Monday for Part II of this series, where I’ll tell you about a big mistake we made early on: building the wrong product.

Further Reading

• In my thesis, I review significant research into improving the UI and smartness of email. Chapter 2 gives you more insight into email overload, and Chapter 3 lists a lot of work done in this area.


• For more background on interesting email-related research ideas, read my earlier blog entry, "How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client".

Arrington on Email Overload

Michael Arrington has a post about email overload on TechCrunch today. A lot of people feel overwhelmed with email: Too many emails, from too many sources, coming in at a faster pace than what you can deal with.

I stumbled on this problem in 2004, while working on Gmail. It is a fascinating space, in which we're stuck in a dilemma of email clients that haven't changed in 15 years and weren't designed to do what they're dealing with today. On the other hand, there is an abundance of academic work trying to address the problem: Just read "How Researchers are Reinventing the Email Client" or my thesis on organizing email.

Even with Xobni, we're only scratching the just the surface of this problem, and there is still so much opportunity out there to improve the email experience for users. It's a huge market with big, established players, ripe for a revolution. Thanks, Arrington, for keeping this on everyone's minds.

Update: An interesting comment from the man himself (#74): "I didn’t quite write this post the way I intended to. There are lots of startups addressing the email problem, one of my favorites is Xobni. I’m thinking of something significantly more revolutionary than fixing email. Like a new way of communicating entirely."

Does your Outlook speak a Foreign Language?

If you have a non-English edition of Microsoft Outlook, I need your help!

Here at Xobni, some of our algorithms and heuristics rely on Outlook speaking English. Unfortunately for our software, but fortunately for us, a very significant percentage of our users work with non-English versions of Outlook.

Since our Pirate Testing Lab and our impressive farm of happy virtual machines contains only English-language Outlook installs, I need your help.

If you have a non-English edition of Outlook, please leave a comment with the following:

• Your country, the language, and version (2003/2007) of your Microsoft Outlook
• The names that your edition of Outlook uses for:
1. Inbox
2. Outbox
3. Sent Items
4. Deleted Items
5. Drafts
6. Junk E-Mail
7. RSS Feeds
8. Search Folders
9. Calendar
• The prefix that your Outlook adds to the subject on an email you reply to. For example, in English this is "Re:". In German this is "Aw:". In Italian, this is "R:"
• The prefix for "Reply All". In English this is "RE:"
• The prefix for "Forward". In English this is "FW:"
• (Extra credit): The prefixes Outlook uses when someone accepts or declines your appointment, or sets attendance to tentative. In English, this is "Accepted:", "Declined:" and "Tentative:"

Thanks so much – your help is greatly appreciated!

Faster chips? Or better software?

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer in today's New York Times article "Faster Chips are Leaving Programmers in their Dust":

In the future, Mr. Mundie said, parallel software will take on tasks that make the computer increasingly act as an intelligent personal assistant.

“My machine overnight could process my in-box, analyze which ones were probably the most important, but it could go a step further,” he said. “It could interpret some of them, it could look at whether I’ve ever corresponded with these people, it could determine the semantic context, it could draft three possible replies. And when I came in in the morning, it would say, hey, I looked at these messages, these are the ones you probably care about, you probably want to do this for these guys, and just click yes and I’ll finish the appointment.”

We have the processing power to do this today, and do it on-the-fly, not overnight. What we need is better email software, not faster chips.

Processing power will clearly remain a problem for some time to come, but Mundie's example is one where the problem lies with building those "smart assistants", not adding chip horsepower.

The Definition of Inbox 2.0

A friend recently asked me to explain the buzzword "Inbox 2.0" he'd heard about. Here's the definition:

Inbox 2.0 == Using data in email archives to infer people's profiles, behaviors, social graph, and importance, and making this information visible in your email client.

Let's pick this definition apart:

1. "Using data in your email archives": There are mountains of hidden data in your email archives, whether locally on your machine or on the server. Inbox 2.0 takes your gigabytes of past email, generates statistics, and applies machine learning and natural language processing techniques to find useful conclusions.


2. "people's profiles": The information in your email paints an accurate picture of your contacts. You can extract their address, phone numbers, their job title, and interests.


3. "behaviors": Your contacts' email stream allows Inbox 2.0 software to infer what time of day they're usually online, when it's best to send them email, and how soon to expect a reply.


4. "social graph": It's easy to extract your social network and social graph by looking at who's Cc'ed on emails, who's mentioned, and how often they're included in conversations.


5. "importance": More important contacts get more of their emails answered faster, and are mentioned in emails to other more often. Their social graph includes other important people.


6. "and making this information visible in your email client": Users want this information as they're triaging and writing email, not as a standalone application. While the data can come from anywhere – local email archives or your trusty Exchange server - integration into the email client is key, whether it's a desktop client like Outlook, Entourage, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird, or a webmail client like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or Gmail.

The term Inbox 2.0 was originally defined in a New York Times article by Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinghouse, and has been discussed by Om Malik, Don Dodge, Deva Hazarika, and Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal.

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More posts on email:

• How Researchers are Reinventing the Email Client


• Email: What's in a Folder?


• Categorizing Email Users

Also, academic email research is discussed in my thesis: Organizing Email. Happy emailing!

Facebook: Email me Instead

Does this look familiar?



AN-NOYING! Why should you need to go to Facebook to read Matt's message?

Matt and Bryan (and to a smaller extent, yours truly) spent a weekend hacking up "Email me Instead", a Facebook application that lets people, well, email you instead.



Get it here.

Obviously, this isn't Xobni's long-awaited killer product. You'll have to wait just a little bit longer.

Hawaii

I'm in Honululu for the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It's been very interesting so far and I've seen some great presentations. Also, this conference sure is in a good location!



My talk tomorrow will be about the upcoming BuzzTrack, a system for topic-based email. You'll find more information on it here, and (hopefully soon) here. I'll also spend some time reviewing work on improving the email interface, which I've written about before.

How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client

For the last 10 years, the three-pane has been the standard view of looking at email. A pane for folders, a pane for folder contents, and one showing the selected email. Even though mail clients are highly configurable, this has been the standard view of many users. It isn't likely to change soon: The beta of Microsoft Outlook 2007 – pictured below – sticks with conventions.


Email today has many annoyances. Even though we now seem to have a grip on the spam problem, many users are suffering from email overload: There are just too many emails flooding the inbox. Many are drowning in heaps of emails that aren't even important – it's just a colleague at work Cc-ing everyone evenly remotely connected to his project.

There are plenty of ideas on how to improve the current state of mail clients, and I'll present some of them here. None of this is my work: I'll give references to publications of others. There are literally hundreds of papers on this subject, so I've chosen to present my selection of personal favorites.

Here are the three ideas I'll present:

• task-driven email organization
• smart organization structures
• cool new features

I'll present one example from each category.

Task-Driven E-Mail Organization

People's lives today are organized in their mail client. It's not just communication that takes place here: Meetings are organized, lists of todos and deadlines are exchanged, documents are sent around.

In effect, what you're keeping track of in your email client are tasks. Most emails you get are part of some project, belong to an event you're attending or organizing, or are part of a greater plan, e.g. keeping in touch with a girl.

That's the idea behind TaskMaster [2], a tool developed at PARC in 2003. All your emails, drafts, attachments, and bookmarks are mapped to "thrasks". Emails in the same thread are grouped automatically, but the user still has to assign other mails, links, and deadlines manually.

Thrasks can have associated actions, such as "call this person", and "review this". You can also add deadlines to each task: they are shown as green and red bars as they approach. Documents can be previewed right inside TaskMaster's UI, as seen with the Word document on the bottom.



I think the great advantage of this approach is that items that belong together are displayed together. Instead of using email folders to hold related messages, the central element is the task, with all the associated deadlines, todo items, and documents.

Here's a quip from the paper's usability interviews:

"It's just nice to be able to have the control over mixing [...] related things together, even though they might not be [...] the identical kind of thing."

What if we went a step further and looked at workflow patterns? For example, at a company where you interview candidates in a formal hiring process, you get automatically generated messages reminding you of the interview, requesting feedback after the interview, and a notification of the final decision. In the future, we might be able to automatically identify the structure of such processes [4] and classify email into these activities [5] – both of which goes beyond Taskmaster's model, which requires some manual effort.

Creating Smart Organization Structures

Almost everyone I know keeps incoming email entirely in the Inbox. Newly arriving messages join the 500 messages already marked as unread and are displayed at the top of the pile. Is there a better way to organize this view? Can we sensibly restructure incoming mail?

Bifrost [6], a plug-in originally conceived at Lotus Research, that takes this approach. The idea here is that the people are the main indicators of whether an email is important. After installing Bifrost, you're asked to sort your contacts into five groups: Your own email addresses, "VIP Platinum" (extremely important people, e.g. your manager), "VIP Gold" (important people: friends and family), as well as small and large distribution mailing lists.

Bifrost then reorganizes your inbox and displays your email in a number of predefined categories:

• Timely: Emails that contain today's or tomorrow's date in the subject line. They'll likely be important today, but not next week.
• VIP Platinum: emails from your manager.
• VIP Gold: emails from friends and family.
• Personal: replies to emails you've sent out, emails sent directly and only to you, and any unclassified emails you receive.
• Small distribution: Intended for group messages.
• Large distribution: Large-distribution mailing lists.

Below is a mock up of what this looks like in practice. (I had to draw this up myself as the screenshots in the paper were too small).


This structure is helpful in identifying important messages and weeding out the less interesting ones. A quote from their user interviews:

"If I am running through an inbox, I might be tempted to read a title and get sucked in because it is interesting. Whereas if it is in a pile of listserv stuff, I just ignore it altogether. That was a nice thing when I was busy, to not get distracted by unimportant mail."

It's interesting to note that except for differentiating small and large distribution messages, this approach can already be replicated in today's email clients. You can simply create search folders or message filtering rules which simulate the Bifrost behavior. However, this would put emails into folders and wouldn't offer the one-page overview that Bifrost has.

Cool New Features

ReMail [7] was a project at IBM Research that ran from 2001 through 2004. It was basically a reimplementation of an email client from the ground up and had several cool new features. I'll describe two of my favorites below.


Thread Arcs visualize relationships between email messages. Instead of wasting lots of space with a tree view that Thunderbird has, it displays the thread structure in a little image. This feature helps you see where you are in a long conversation. For example, in the picture below, emails B, C, D, E, F, and H are all direct replies to A, while email G is a reply to E.



The advantage of thread arcs is that you can see the position of the email you're viewing in the larger conversation, without having to switch to a tree view: your main inbox pane remains sorted by arrival time.

Contact Maps offer a different view of the address book: Senders from which you have received email are grouped by domain. Each person's name is shown with a different background color, depending on the time of the last email exchange. This offers a better view of your contacts than the traditional non-grouped lists where your least important contact looks just like your most important one.



Many of ReMail's other ideas can be found in today's popular clients: Instant messaging is now integrated with Gmail, which also groups emails by thread. The collection mechanism in ReMail is semantically equivalent to Gmail's labels. Outlook integrates emails and calendaring and has list separators ('today', 'yesterday', 'last month'), just like the ReMail prototype.

Conclusions

It seems like the ideal email organization tool would be like your personal, smart secretary: It knows what's important or interesting, and deals with stuff you don't want to be bothered with. That would be perfect.

Today, we seem to be at a point where it seems like we might be able to solve the spam problem. But the problem of figuring out which of the non-spam emails is important, and what it relates to, still exists.

One solution – the one I presented here – is to add nifty features to the mail client. But would all these features really be understood and used? Users today seem to be using a very basic set of mail client functionality. Anything we add should not only solve a painful problem, but also be easy to use. I'm not even sure this applies to the applications I've shown here: You don't know until you've tried.

What do you think? Are these good ideas? Would normal people who are drowning in email use these features? What features can't you live without? Post a comment and let me know.

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Thanks to Keno Albrecht, Bálint Miklós , Markus Egli, and Fabian Siegel for reviewing drafts of this.

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References

A more thorough and academic overview of the subject:
[1] Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, Jacek Gwizdka: Email in personal information management, Communications of the ACM, 2006

Examples of task- and activity-based systems:
[2] Victoria Bellotti, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mark Howard, Ian Smith: Taking email to task., CHI, 2003
[3] Michael J. Muller, Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, Eric Wilcox, David R. Millen: One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects, CHI, 2004
[4] Nicholas Kushmerick, Tessa Lau: Automated email activity management: an unsupervised learning approach, IUI 2005
[5] Mark Dredze, Tessa Lau, Nicholas Kushmerick: Automatically classifying emails into activities, IUI 2006

Bifrost:
[6] Olle Bälter, L Sidner: Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox, NordiCHI, 2002

ReMail:
[7] ReMail: Reinventing Email Website, Collaborative User Experience, IBM Research, 2003