Final Prototype Testing
We performed initial, informal tests of our Final Prototype at the end of our project. The overall takeaway is that TeamMail does a great job, often to the point of replacing other collaboration tools.
Probably the single most used function of TeamMail was document editing. We saw this pattern repeated several times — a document's original author sent a shared task to the entire group, attaching a document. People edited the document asynchronously and uploaded their versions back up to the same email or task. One collaborator was assigned merger duty. After a period of time had passed, the new merged version was posted back to the task for the purpose of distribution. Sometimes this cycle repeated several times — the longest document edit resulted in 25 posts over the course of 3 days, with 22 of them containing a document update. TeamMail clearly improved upon the intrinsic organizational ability of email in terms of keeping information in one place, and leveraging that for dynamic task content providing real collaboration value. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that because the task was so vague and quite iterative in nature, no one ever actually changed their status.
The majority of interesting observations were unanticipated uses that, while not exactly negative, served to indicate several potential new directions for TeamMail. We describe the most significant two below.
Unanticipated Uses
While the conversationally threaded postings were designed to support asynchronous collaboration, we found that, when used synchronously, they served as a roughly real-time chat space. It never occured to us to push an email client into becoming a real-time collaboration device, but it actually makes a lot of sense. We had already seen systems like the developing Lotus Workplace that incorporated instant messenger availability displays into email, which partly inspired our people palette design and future recommendations. This observation is reason to dig much deeper in investigating how much opportunity email clients can provide in scaling asynchronous communication to synchronous communication dynamically.
Posting was originally conceived of for interpersonal collaboration on shared tasks, but for simplicity of implementation we enabled posting for any task. If a person has a personal task or email sent through the TeamMail server, they can post updates that only they can see. Some users used this feature far more than anticipated, encapsulating an entire dynamic todo list within one email. When items were added, a post would include them in the list. For particularly interactive todo lists, the entire list would be copied over, deleting finished items and adding new items, and re-posted so as to push the previous version below the email preview fold. This seems to be strong evidence for including greater post-receipt editability in emails and tasks, such as being able to edit subjects or other traditionally static fields.
