{"id":71,"date":"2007-11-02T15:59:18","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T20:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/2007\/11\/02\/radial-radar-email-vis-with-care-factors\/"},"modified":"2009-04-01T08:25:42","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T13:25:42","slug":"radial-radar-email-vis-with-care-factors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/2007\/11\/02\/radial-radar-email-vis-with-care-factors\/","title":{"rendered":"radial (radar) email vis, with care factors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/radial-care-factor-vis.png\" alt=\"radial-care-factor-vis.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a radial e-mail visualization intended to be the basis for a &#8220;situational awareness&#8221; overview of your e-mail.  I&#8217;ve added the beginnings of a &#8216;care factor&#8217;* (&#8220;do I care about this person\/message?&#8221;) concept to messages and contacts, which is used to assist in focusing your attention only to messages\/people you care about.  Right now, the care factor is simply whether you have ever sent the contact\/author of a message an e-mail directly (to = 1.0), indirectly (cc = 0.5), or not at all (nada\/ninguno=0.0).  That can obviously be expanded upon in many directions; involvement of people you care about in message threads (with that person), intensity of your communication with that person, explicit interest-levels via tags, social network propagation (Google&#8217;s OpenSocial) without the person previously having existed in your e-mail corpus, etc.<\/p>\n<p>Some more details about the visualization:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Things close to the center happened more recently.  Things further away happened in the past.  This seems like the most reasonable &#8216;radar&#8217; metaphor for e-mail.  If we were dealing with to-do items with due dates, then it would make sense that they are moving inward.  However, the reality of e-mail is that if you don&#8217;t deal with them soon, they &#8216;fall off your radar&#8217;.  My first thought to fuse the two would be to have messages associated with to-do tasks stick out quite obviously, latch once they hit the &#8216;edge&#8217;, and generally grow more ominous and threatening as time goes by.  Of course, it&#8217;s probably not helpful to make people&#8217;s to-do lists seem like something they can&#8217;t escape&#8230;\n<ul>\n<li>The central grey circle is a void to ensure that angle is still meaningful even when the time is at a minimum; otherwise things would stack up and be generally extra confusing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The angle is mapped to a single author\/contact.  This is currently random, but my intent is to allow clustering of contacts and quasi-persistent angular locations.  So messages from your family might tend to come from the North, your friends the East, mailing lists the West, and ads from the South.  (Let&#8217;s assume you get no spam.)\u00a0 Actual geographic relationships would be a neat trick, but practically foolish.<\/li>\n<li>Messages with a low care-factor are made more subtle by having reduced opacities.  I forgot to make the edges linking messages to their parent more subtle&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Contacts with a high care-factor get their (anonymized) name in a strong color and their slice of the pie highlighted with a color.  Contacts with a low care-factor have their names displayed more subtly and just get a grey hue for their outer-ring marker\/label.  The intent with the slice coloring is mainly to be intensity based with only one or two hues in use; I think using more colors will quickly overwhelm the display.<\/li>\n<li>Time markers are in use, but may not be obvious.  The blue ring labeled &#8217;30&#8217; (along the x-axis) indicates that&#8217;s October 30th.  The inner white ring is November 1st, but I&#8217;m not clear on why it wasn&#8217;t labeled as such (aka bug).  The time marker logic needs to be refactored to provide more usable single &#8220;ruler&#8221; labeling (the timeline use currently is biased towards 2 rulers, which is where the month and year went).  See the test program output from below for a better example of time display, although the month\/year are still AWOL in another ruler.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/radial-blah-blah-blah.png\" alt=\"radial-blah-blah-blah.png\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s the test program.  Note that edges connect a message to its parent, and currently always flow clock-wise for time.  So the innermost red message is the parent of the inner-most green message.  I&#8217;m a bit conflicted about this; the consistency is nice, but the relationship would probably be more obvious if we took the shortest path.  Also, since e-mail reply relationships are causal, it&#8217;s not like there&#8217;s any doubt which message was a reply to the other.<\/p>\n<p>* I say &#8216;care factor&#8217; because I did this work on a red-eye flight where my tiredness overwhelmed my natural defense against puns, and since Halloween was recent, and there was that tv show called &#8216;scare factor&#8217;, etc. etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a radial e-mail visualization intended to be the basis for a &#8220;situational awareness&#8221; overview of your e-mail. I&#8217;ve added the beginnings of a &#8216;care factor&#8217;* (&#8220;do I care about this person\/message?&#8221;) concept to messages and contacts, which is used &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/2007\/11\/02\/radial-radar-email-vis-with-care-factors\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12,4],"tags":[127,45,39],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email","category-posterity","category-visualizing","tag-posterity","tag-radar","tag-visophyte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visophyte.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}