Bachelorarbeit

Visualization and Interaction Techniques for Future E-Mail-Clients

Aufgabenstellung

Computer-Desktops of the future must handle enormous quantities of documents and a multitude of personalized information items while providing intuitive user interfaces for everyday users. Current operating systems, such as Mac OS X Tiger already provide new visualization and interaction techniques, among them 3D animations, transparent layers and Dashboard widgets. High-end graphics technologies - e.g. DirectX for Microsoft's upcoming Avalon GUI technology - constitute the basis for future graphical user interfaces of everyday applications. Such applications, most notably file and document managers as well as e-mail clients, should overcome the restrictions of inflexible hierarchy and table visualizations. Instead they should provide better access to the abundance of data. Moreover, current techniques - such as smart mail boxes - do not sufficiently cope with semantical information and other associated meta data. The goal of this thesis is to design novel visualization and interaction concepts for future e-mail managers. They should facilitate everyday work with huge e-mail collections, provide visual clarity as well as contain interaction and visualization capabilities for dis-covering semantic correlations between e-mails. The following results are expected from this bachelor thesis:

Analysis of use cases and requirements for various e-mail application scenarios: arranging and classifying e-mails (e.g. in multiple, non-hierarchical or fuzzy groups), annotation and insertion of meta data, flexible filtering, archiving of mails etc.
Description of the state-of-the-art and related research in the field of
- current e-mail clients and comparable GUIs,
- novel techniques for visualizing documents based on hierarchies and tables (e.g. radial layout, multi-hierarchies), appropriate animation techniques for GUIs and alternative interaction metaphors (e.g. mouse gestures).
Conceptual design of novel approaches to support selected use cases using the analyzed repertoire of visualization, interaction and animation techniques.
Prototypical realization (e.g. as a Flash mockup) of selected concepts, if possible based on real data derived from the Outlook API.

Weitere Informationen

Autor(en):	Markus Weiland
Laufzeit:	01.06.2005 - 29.09.2005
Verantwortlicher HSL:	Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Meißner
Betreuer:	Dr.-Ing. Raimund Dachselt
Institut, Lehrstuhl:	SMT, Multimediatechnik
Zugehörige Projekte:	INPERIC