POEM: People-Oriented EMail for Social Connectedness

Email has lost much of its original function: connecting people. Today, people use it as a task list, a database, and even legal documentation. For these and other reasons, email has become a source of stress; pushing us apart rather than bringing us together. In this paper, we describe POEM (People-Oriented EMail), a prototype email client designed to restore and strengthen email’s socially connective role. Because much of human communication is non-verbal, POEM features a visualization that summarizes user’s inbox by correspondent, using their profile pictures. To highlight human relationships, POEM offers access to detailed correspondent messages only by clicking on their pictures. Encouraging deeper relationships, POEM organizes correspondents by social importance measures including communication effort, balance, and delay before response. We conclude by sketching our plans to evaluate POEM.