IxD

Making An Email Client

A new semester, a new challenge for an old friend- email clients!

Marcus Thomas

Mar 21, 2025

Intro

Email has remained a cornerstone of digital communication for decades, bridging personal and professional interactions across the globe. However, the way we use email has evolved dramatically, influenced by shifting work cultures, the rise of AI-driven productivity tools, and a growing need for better digital organization. Today’s users demand faster, more intuitive ways to manage their inboxes without being bogged down by cluttered interfaces, long, confusing threads, and disconnected contacts. Despite its age, email remains irreplaceable, making it crucial to rethink how we engage with it.

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How might we...

  • Declutter Outlook's UI & Prevent Cognitive Overload
    • Many email interfaces remain visually overwhelming, featuring excessive icons, sidebars, and toolbars that contribute to decision fatigue.
  • Avoid Losing Context in Long Email Threads
    • Conversations often become difficult to navigate, especially in high-volume discussions where important details get buried under a sea of replies.
  • Bring Groups Forward for Better Email Management

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Research

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SWOT analysis of three email clients

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Latecomer Inspiration - Newton Mail

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Proposal

To address these challenges, my redesign of Microsoft Outlook introduces a fresh approach centered on three key pillars:

‍

Focus Mode

  • Many email interfaces remain visually overwhelming, featuring excessive icons, sidebars, and toolbars that contribute to decision fatigue.

‍

AI-Powered Conversation Summaries

  • An AI-driven feature that automatically generates digestible conversation overviews.
  • Key action items, decisions, and unresolved questions are highlighted within threads to reduce the need for excessive scrolling.

‍

Group-Centric Email Management

  • Shifting from an individual sender-focused prioritization model to a group-based one.
  • Contact groups are surfaced more prominently, allowing users to manage and filter emails at the team or project level rather than relying on VIP tagging.

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Concept and methodology

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‍

Flowchart

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UML Diagram
IxD

Making An Email Client

A new semester, a new challenge for an old friend- email clients!

Marcus Thomas

Mar 21, 2025

Intro

Email has remained a cornerstone of digital communication for decades, bridging personal and professional interactions across the globe. However, the way we use email has evolved dramatically, influenced by shifting work cultures, the rise of AI-driven productivity tools, and a growing need for better digital organization. Today’s users demand faster, more intuitive ways to manage their inboxes without being bogged down by cluttered interfaces, long, confusing threads, and disconnected contacts. Despite its age, email remains irreplaceable, making it crucial to rethink how we engage with it.

‍

How might we...

  • Declutter Outlook's UI & Prevent Cognitive Overload
    • Many email interfaces remain visually overwhelming, featuring excessive icons, sidebars, and toolbars that contribute to decision fatigue.
  • Avoid Losing Context in Long Email Threads
    • Conversations often become difficult to navigate, especially in high-volume discussions where important details get buried under a sea of replies.
  • Bring Groups Forward for Better Email Management

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Research

‍

SWOT analysis of three email clients

‍

‍

Latecomer Inspiration - Newton Mail

‍

‍

Proposal

To address these challenges, my redesign of Microsoft Outlook introduces a fresh approach centered on three key pillars:

‍

Focus Mode

  • Many email interfaces remain visually overwhelming, featuring excessive icons, sidebars, and toolbars that contribute to decision fatigue.

‍

AI-Powered Conversation Summaries

  • An AI-driven feature that automatically generates digestible conversation overviews.
  • Key action items, decisions, and unresolved questions are highlighted within threads to reduce the need for excessive scrolling.

‍

Group-Centric Email Management

  • Shifting from an individual sender-focused prioritization model to a group-based one.
  • Contact groups are surfaced more prominently, allowing users to manage and filter emails at the team or project level rather than relying on VIP tagging.

‍

‍

Concept and methodology

‍

‍

Flowchart

‍

‍

UML Diagram

Early Draft

After sharing the first version of my Outlook redesign, I got some great feedback that’s helping me rethink a few key areas. One of the biggest notes was to cut back on overlapping panels—they were crowding the interface and taking away from the clean, focused experience I was aiming for. People also pointed out some redundant information popping up in multiple places, which added to the clutter instead of reducing it. The most exciting piece of feedback, though, was the push to reimagine how relationships between groups are displayed. There’s a real opportunity to move past the usual lists and folders and come up with something more visual and meaningful. It was all great fuel for the next round of design updates.

Final Version

Future Considerations//
Reflections
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In the final round of feedback, a lot of the earlier critiques were addressed—I successfully reduced overlapping panels and cut out redundant information wherever it crept in. The new approach to showing groups was also really well received, and I think dropping the old-school ‘VIP’ concept helped make the whole system feel more inclusive and context-aware. One piece of feedback that really stuck with me, though, was a suggestion to reimagine the Focus Mode as something closer to a social media-style feed. The idea is to surface important emails from key groups or favorited contacts in a way that feels more natural and scrollable—something familiar, but tailored for productivity. It’s a direction I hadn’t fully considered before, but it opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for how users might intuitively engage with what matters most.

All things considered, this was a much more enjoyable process than I initially thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, the project interested me from the start, but it wasn't until the push to go further and unshackle myself a bit from UX conventions that I felt like this was something special. This project was a great reminder that even though us designers aren't often seen as people that consider self-expression first when creating, it's great exercise to give ourselves the opportunity to become the client. By just focusing on working out our creativity outside of what's trending, on 'this thing is so ubiquitus it's almost weird that we haven't revisited this', we're opening ourselves up to new ways of lateral thinking.
IxD

Making An Email Client

A new semester, a new challenge for an old friend- email clients!

Marcus Thomas

Mar 21, 2025

Intro

Email has remained a cornerstone of digital communication for decades, bridging personal and professional interactions across the globe. However, the way we use email has evolved dramatically, influenced by shifting work cultures, the rise of AI-driven productivity tools, and a growing need for better digital organization. Today’s users demand faster, more intuitive ways to manage their inboxes without being bogged down by cluttered interfaces, long, confusing threads, and disconnected contacts. Despite its age, email remains irreplaceable, making it crucial to rethink how we engage with it.

‍

How might we...

  • Declutter Outlook's UI & Prevent Cognitive Overload
    • Many email interfaces remain visually overwhelming, featuring excessive icons, sidebars, and toolbars that contribute to decision fatigue.
  • Avoid Losing Context in Long Email Threads
    • Conversations often become difficult to navigate, especially in high-volume discussions where important details get buried under a sea of replies.
  • Bring Groups Forward for Better Email Management

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

Research

‍

SWOT analysis of three email clients

‍

‍

Latecomer Inspiration - Newton Mail

‍

‍

Proposal

To address these challenges, my redesign of Microsoft Outlook introduces a fresh approach centered on three key pillars:

‍

Focus Mode

  • Many email interfaces remain visually overwhelming, featuring excessive icons, sidebars, and toolbars that contribute to decision fatigue.

‍

AI-Powered Conversation Summaries

  • An AI-driven feature that automatically generates digestible conversation overviews.
  • Key action items, decisions, and unresolved questions are highlighted within threads to reduce the need for excessive scrolling.

‍

Group-Centric Email Management

  • Shifting from an individual sender-focused prioritization model to a group-based one.
  • Contact groups are surfaced more prominently, allowing users to manage and filter emails at the team or project level rather than relying on VIP tagging.

‍

‍

Concept and methodology

‍

‍

Flowchart

‍

‍

UML Diagram

Beautiful design has the power to captivate audiences

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