微软研究院 (Microsoft Research)

When Words Collide:  Organizing Your E-mail Inbox (feel free to share this message with your customers!)

当单词冲突时：组织您的电子邮件收件箱(随时与您的客户共享此消息！)

The daily flood of e-mail messages is like a baby's cry — insistent but mysterious. You genuinely want to understand the meaning, but you can't always grasp the language.

每天的电子邮件泛滥，就像婴儿的哭声一样-坚持却神秘。 您确实希望理解其含义，但不能总是掌握该语言。

Gina Venolia, a user interface engineer with Microsoft Research, wants to make it easy for you to understand even the most complex conversations. She's designed an e-mail interface that focuses on conversations instead of messages, putting what's most important about communication first - the people.

Microsoft Research的用户界面工程师Gina Venolia希望让您轻松理解最复杂的对话。 她设计了一个电子邮件界面，该界面着重于对话而不是消息，将交流中最重要的部分放在第一位。

"I like slogans," says Venolia. "And for quite a while my slogan was, "It's about people!" Venolia says that she thought about this a lot after producing a batch of applications that were supposed to be about communication, but just created more layers of intricacy for the user to decipher.

Venolia说：“我喜欢口号。” “而且很长时间以来，我的口号是：“这是关于人的！” Venolia说，在制作了一批本应用于通信的应用程序之后，她对此进行了很多思考，但只是为用户创造了更多的复杂性解码。

Then, about five years ago she attended an all-day meeting. Doodling on a paper napkin, she came up with a list of all the different ways she could send information digitally: e-mail, attached documents, instant messages, shared files, FTP, Web sites, the telephone. "I ended up with over a dozen things. And each one of them had its own tool and its own quirks. I thought, 'something is wrong here'," said Venolia.

然后，大约五年前，她参加了一个全天会议。 她在餐巾纸上涂鸦，想出了各种可以数字方式发送信息的方式的清单：电子邮件，附件，即时消息，共享文件，FTP，网站，电话。 Venolia说：“我最终得到了十几种东西。每个东西都有自己的工具和怪癖。我认为，'这里有些问题'。”

To find some answers, she started observing and surveying people to learn about their e-mail habits. What emerged was some organizing principles about how to communicate digitally. She discovered that people focus on conversations instead of a single message. She also found out that digital conversations aren't as ephemeral as spoken conversations. People often want to preserve them or turn them into action items.

为了找到答案，她开始观察和调查人们以了解他们的电子邮件习惯。 出现了一些有关如何进行数字通信的组织原则。 她发现人们专注于对话而不是一条消息。 她还发现，数字对话不像口头对话那样短暂。 人们经常想保留它们或将它们变成行动项目。

As a result, she designed an innovative interface, code-named Grand Central, which organizes messages into conversations, and allows people to easily store and retrieve conversations.

结果，她设计了一个创新的界面，代号为Grand Central，该界面将消息组织到对话中，使人们可以轻松地存储和检索对话。

Focus On ConversationsCurrent e-mail tools are like looking at a conversation with a magnifying glass. It's easy to see the details but difficult to get an overall picture. In Venolia's interface you view conversations as a whole instead of as individual messages. The initial message is shown at the top, and the most recent reply at the bottom, followed by the text box to input your response, similar to a chat format:

专注于对话当前的电子邮件工具就像用放大镜看着对话一样。 细节很容易看到，但总体情况却很难。 在Venolia的界面中，您可以查看整个会话而不是单个消息。 最初的消息显示在顶部，最新的答复显示在底部，然后是文本框，用于输入您的回复，类似于聊天格式：

The Grand Central Conversation Interface

大中央对话界面

She found out that about half the time you use e-mail, it's a no-brainer. Someone sends you a message, you reply, they reply back, and it's done. But if there's nine people on the 'to' line, and each one is throwing his or her hat into the conversational ring -- making decisions, offering suggestions, providing links to back up their story, or jumping in to IM you -- it becomes harder to understand who is saying what to whom. In Venolia's interface you can see what a message is a reply to by looking at the heavy black lines that join the messages

她发现大约有一半的时间使用电子邮件，这很容易。 有人给您发送了一条消息，您进行回复，然后他们回复，就完成了。 但是，如果有9个人处于“收件人”行列，而每个人都将他或她的帽子扔进对话圈中-做出决策，提供建议，提供备份其故事的链接，或者跳入IM中-变得很难理解谁在向谁说什么。 在Venolia的界面中，您可以通过查看连接消息的粗黑线来查看消息的答复

Finding an email conversation weeks or months after you've finished it can be maddening. You might look for it under a person's name, but maybe that person isn't someone who you do business with regularly, so you don't quite remember the name. Or you could look for it by date - but if it was months ago, that could be a problem, especially if you aren't sure whether it was March or May or June. There are multiple ways to remember facts and information. So why shouldn't you be able to store and retrieve it in multiple ways? Venolia's interface allows you find conversations by date, person and other attributes or to label your conversations using keywords of your own.

在完成数周或数月后找到电子邮件对话可能会令人发疯。 您可能会以一个人的名字寻找它，但也许那个人不是您经常与之打交道的人，因此您不太记得这个名字。 或者，您可以按日期查找它-但是如果是几个月前，那可能是个问题，尤其是如果您不确定是3月，5月还是6月。 记住事实和信息有多种方法。 那么，为什么不应该以多种方式存储和检索它呢？ Venolia的界面使您可以按日期，人和其他属性查找对话，或使用自己的关键字标记对话。

Conversation Clues
In a conversation where a message gets multiple replies, a simple chronological view of the messages isn't enough to convey the relationships between the replies. For example, if a message gets two replies, and each of those two got a single reply, your conversation would now have branches. Grand Central handles these relationships by showing lines along the left edges of the messages. You can see at a glance how many branches a conversation has. To help you follow just one person's views - say your boss or the company guru -- Grand Central uses colored lines to connect replies from the same person.

对话线索
在一条消息获得多个答复的对话中，简单的按时间顺序排列的消息视图不足以传达答复之间的关系。 例如，如果一条消息得到两个答复，而这两个消息中的每个得到一个答复，则您的对话现在将具有分支。 Grand Central通过在消息的左边缘显示线条来处理这些关系。 您可以一眼看到对话中有多少分支。 为了帮助您仅遵循一个人的观点(例如您的老板或公司负责人)，Grand Central使用彩色线条连接同一人的答复。

It doesn't stop here. Venolia has also designed the user interface to give you some metrics about your conversations - you can find out at-a-glance just who you communicate with the most, and whether you are the originator, recipient or a participant. You can also see a complete list of the attachments, URLS, and images that are found in all your messages, in case you don't want to hunt through past e-mails to find that one document or Web site reference that you want.

不止于此。 Venolia还设计了用户界面，以为您提供有关对话的一些指标-您可以一目了然地了解最常与谁交流，以及您是发起者，接收者还是参与者。 如果您不想搜寻过去的电子邮件来查找所需的一个文档或网站参考，还可以查看在所有邮件中找到的附件，URL和图像的完整列表。

Grand Central is designed to help people keep track of conversations as they're happening, easily integrate different digital communication methods, turn a conversation into a follow-up task, and find and reference past conversations and the digital information that comes with them.

Grand Central旨在帮助人们跟踪正在进行的对话，轻松集成不同的数字通信方法，将对话转变为后续任务以及查找和引用过去的对话以及随之而来的数字信息。

Her innovative concepts show future promise for a medium that has become our number one communication tool. "My goal is to make things better for people who use e-mail, which is just about everyone. E-mail overload is everywhere. People can spend over an hour and a half on e-mail a day. And it's not just knowledge workers — it's everyone. Grand Central is just a picture of how it could be made easier in the future," said Venolia.

她的创新理念显示了对已成为我们第一沟通工具的媒体的未来前景。 “我的目​​标是为几乎所有人使用电子邮件的人提供更好的服务。电子邮件过载无处不在。人们每天可以花一个半小时以上的时间来阅读电子邮件。这不仅仅是知识。工人–所有人。大中央车站只是未来如何变得更容易的示意图。”