Final Prototype (P2) Overview
Overview
The second and final fully-functional version of the TeamMail prototype (P2) expands the personal reminder system of P1 and adds support for workers collaborating on a task through a single dynamically shared task email.
We identified three major intents on the part of the user in the context of working within shared tasks:
- I want to see the latest version of a shared document. I want to see if so & so has finished yet.
- I want to see who else has chimed in, or knows about this issue.
- I want to know who I’m accountable to.
To support these, we made our concept of sharing information between collaborators much more granular than our previous concept of a public project space. Instead, emails themselves can become shared objects (whether they are tasks or not), and to display this, we radically redesigned the email preview pane for such items. New to the Final Prototype is an integration of all conversation around a task, storage for task documents, and a people palette that shows who is involved and what their responsibilities, status, and history are.
Technology
TeamMail enables dynamically shared tasks via a separate task management server that works in parallel to the users' current IMAP or POP servers. To explain how we architected this system, we put together a diagram of the system in action:
