** PRESENTED IN SIGGRAPH 2005, the 32nd International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques **

** Blogged in textually.org

Keywords: information visualization, email, digital portable devices, personal computing

References: Newsmap, SmartMoney Map of the Market, BabyNameWizard...

Date: Spring 2005

CELLPHONE APPLICATIONS

CellMailGraph: A Graphical Interface to a Mailbox on a Handheld Device

Description: Java application to visualize on a cellphone or PDA the incoming emails in a mailbox.

Aim: CellMailGraph is a project about the exploration of alternative ways to visualize information and mobile devices as a platform for personal and social applications. I used email to come up with a way to represent textual information on small screens with graphics and make them meaningful and personal.

Target: My target audience are cell phone and PDA users in general. I assume they will be partially tech savvy, and the kind of users that utilize their cell phone as a personal assistant rather than as a device to make and receive phone calls and text messages.

Visualization:

Dots: every dot represents an email. The last email that arrived to the inbox throbs.

Colors: The colors identify tracked contacts. The messages coming from unmonitored email addresses are grey. As dots get farther from the center and, therefore, older, they become more and more transparent.

Concentric Rings: The concentric rings comprise a time period of 24 hours. The emails older than that stack in the corners of the image.

Size: The dots are proportional to the size of the email.

Darker blue circle: It refers to the total amount of unread emails in the mailbox. With the current settings, a circle as big as the screen refers to over 100 mails.

Text: the keywords found in any of the messages are written down on the screen in the color that matches the sender, tracked or not tracked.

Target pointer: acts as a mouse that allows us to navigate the graphical inbox and select dots/emails.

Interaction:

Technology: J2ME to build the client, Perl and MySQL to communicate with the mailbox and the database where user preferences are kept. Processing to prototype visualizations.