displaying combined similar data

Question

I'm designing a web application - prototyping and wireframing the main pages so I've got an idea of what it will do. I'm struggling on how to display my data to users.

We basically provide them with an email inbox, a phone message system and a fax system. This means three different types of data - one is textual, one is audio and one is visual. They share some common properties however, and the point of our service is to unify users communications, so it makes sense to combine them.

Mashing the data together in any way results in a very sparse summary, the only information they share is the sender and the date. So after spending 5 hours agonising over design decisions I thought I'd open it up. The options we're leaning to is

1. Show a 'unified inbox' with a link to view the full item details on a per line basis
2. Drop the idea of a dashboard and just have an individual inbox in the web interface for each service. We can display the number of new messages on the tab for the service so they know there are new messages
3. Show a very simple summary as the dashboard, merely showing the number of new 'communications' in each of the users inboxes (fax, email, voice).

What is best from a design perspective? We could conduct user testing, but it's a shoestring startup, so the costs of mocking up 3 complete UI's is prohibitive at this point.

Answer 1

I'm confused what the question is, should we suggest the UI layout? Or are you looking for ideas on how to prototype / play around with a look / solution?

I use Balsamic Mockups for all my UI designs, spend some time laying it out, and it is a great way to visualize what you want, and it adds a level of interactivity to it as well.

Hopefully thats somewhat along the lines of what you were asking ;).

Otherwise I would go with something like you mentioned above:

1. Show a summary / dashboard page showing say last 10 of the last messages (voice / email / fax).
2. Show # of new items per service, and go from there.

Answer 2

As I understand, your problem is that you can't show anything useful for Fax or voicemail?

Still, what would be gained by separate inboxes? If you want to unify these three services, separating by type is what you don't do. The most important search / access vectors are WHO and WHEN.

(There is of course the need to search for "the fax from Mr. Lyle", so filtering by type should be possible. But it's not the fundamental access filter)

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My suggestions (I understand that some of these might be complicated):

Single inbox. Icon for type.

If possible, try using "natural times" such as "a few minutes ago", "yesterday, 12:31" (if you use it for minutes, you may need to do that ajaxy thing to refresh them).

e-mail: Include the title of the e-mail / text message. If you can, Add line of text - fill up from the body, omitting line breaks, untuil you reach a certain character count or the width of the panel.

Fax: it might help to show # of pages (not sure if this is possible) and mouseover for thumbnail. The first deals with people failing to send all pages at once, the second with people inserting them the wrong way around.

Audio: Allow to play right from the inbox. Duration might be helpful to filter out "oh, it's voice mail, I'll hang up" calls, it's also a good preview on how much time I need to "read" this message.

Don't add irrelevant data just because it's shared between the two (e.g. size).

Sort by time received (or time sent if available?).
If there are many unread messages in the inbox, and there are multiple messages from the same sender without other messages inbetween, you can collapse them (e.g. only show the first two of the sequence, and a "more messages from Joanna..." link. This helps against important single message drowned by communicators gone wild.

An option would be to group by sender, at least for selected Senders, so that it reads

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From Joanna
|V| 5 min ago Hey again Joe, just ust wanted to say....
o<| 5 min ago Hello, it's me! Hmm it seems oyu areally are on a business..
72 new since yesterday ( |=| 5 o<| 52 |V| 15)

From Mr Lyle
|=| yesterday, 12:12 7 pages [show]

Other |V| 1h ago [email protected] Cheap Torpedoes Your best source of cheap, ...
|V| 1h ago [email protected] Torpedoes Mania ON SALE! GU 537! sinks any ... 12 new since yesterday ( |V| 12)

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Mr. Lyle doesn't have an abstract since there is only one new message. Clicking an abstract would expand that list, clicking a user would show you messages (including old ones) only from this user.

Phew. Hope that helps.