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Jason ZalingerRensselaer Center for Open SoftwareRensselaer Polytechnic InstituteAugust13, 2010Code: Jeremy TherrienArt/animation: Eric NewsomSound: david f. bello

Gmail Adventures

1Final UpdateFive interviews conducted so farMore scheduled in the coming weeksThis time I would like to share some specific design recommendations drawn from my interviews.

2Participant: BlakeInterviewer: If you could change the game to encourage a user to explore his or her Gmail archive what would you change?Blake: Maybe objectives? I'm not sure how itd be possible to achieve that.Design Recommendation:We would love to add objectives into the game, but we just havent found the right way to do it yet.However, this would make a fascinating feature for Gmail. What if Gmail had little objectives that encouraged you to explore your archives?

3Participant: DavidInterviewer: If you could change the game to encourage a user to explore his or her Gmail archive what would you change?David: extensible filters to cut out a lot of garbage e-mails and/or a way to fly through the rooms to get to more important e-mails.Design Recommendation: David highlights a major challenge: Spam! We made a design decision to keep the game random rather than try to guess what emails a user deems important. This is an unresolved issue!

Participant: StanleyInterviewer: If you could change the game to encourage a user to explore his or her Gmail archive what would you change?Stanley: Have more types of characters to speak to, or change the settings. Like you could go to a zoo and have a giraffe tell you old emails. Interviewer: Why the non-human avatars?Stanley: Amusement mostly, but also most of my emails were from a farm, so it would be neat seeing a sheep talk about buying wool.Design Recommendation: Stanley points out a very interesting but challenging question: How can we design a variety of avatars for our contact list? Should Gmail offer a list of avatars to choose from like the way they do with their standalone Google Talk client? And if so, would this encourage people to go back and explore?

ConclusionI need one more interview!I found my interviews to be eye opening, and I hope to submit a draft paper based on my results sometime this fall.Thank you RCOS and Professor Moorthy!And of course, thank you to Sean OSullivan for hismoney!Have a great semester!