The Research On Interaction Design For Web-based Email

Email has already become an essential interactive product in people's daily life. Although many e-mail systems nowadays are developed as a versatile agent, it is really difficult to find a genuine easy-to-use mail service. Considering their usability, however, few of them are easy to use and most of them fail to provide good user experience. The reason is that these mail systems fail to consider their users. Typically, these mailboxes are designed only to show functions. Maybe they are functional, but they neglect their users. The purpose of this research is to explore a new framework to develop an easy-to-use, effective and satisfying email system.This research examines the user needs of email system with behavior observation and user interview, and classifies all user needs into two categories: usability need and experience need. Based on the classification, a task analysis experiment is designed to (1) evaluate current email service prototype, (2) address the problems beneath it and (3) explore new emerging user needs. This research argues that most problems found in the experiment result from the neglect of user need in traditional function-oriented email service prototype, and develops a user-oriented design framework. Finally, a design practice is presented as an application of the framework.This thesis emphasizes the importance of user needs in email system design, and classifies all user needs into two categories: usability need and experience need. It presents a user-oriented design framework as well as some related principals in user interface design.