IBM Watson Research Center

Technical Report: THREAD ARCS: An Email Thread Visualization THREAD ARCS: An Email Thread Visualization Technical Report #: 03-16 Author(s): Bernard Kerr Category(s): User Interfaces, conversations, discussions, electronic mail, email, information visualization, threads, tree structures Full Citation: IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization October 2003, Seattle, Washington Copyright 2003, IBM. All rights reserved. IBM RC# 22951 Abstract A Collaborative User Experience Technical Report: more about CUE... This paper describes Thread Arcs, a novel interactive visualization technique designed to help people use threads found in email. Thread Arcs combine the chronology of messages with the branching tree structure of a conversational thread in a mixed-model visualization [Venolia and Neustaedter 2003] that is stable and compact. By quickly scanning and interacting with Thread Arcs, people can see various attributes of conversations and find relevant messages in them easily. We tested this technique against other visualization techniques with users’ own email in a functional prototype email client. Thread Arcs proved an excellent match for the types of threads found in users’ email and for the qualities users wanted in small-scale visualizations. Full Report For more information, or to order a Technical Report, contact us.