
Ask HN: Reimagining the inbox – transitioning from a list to a visualisation - Regraph
Hi All, first post here so hope I&#x27;m doing this right.<p>The inbox hasn&#x27;t really changed for 30+ years. You get new emails at the top, you scroll down to find emails, and, if you want you can organise them into folders&#x2F;tags.<p>Yes, Inbox by Gmail and a few others e.g. Superhuman, have created &#x27;smart&#x27; inboxes, classifying emails into subcategories such as &quot;Primary&quot;, &quot;Updates&quot;, or &quot;Social&quot;. Ultimately however these are really still just lists.<p>The last week or so I&#x27;ve been playing around with some new UIs that try and break this paradigm:<p><pre><code>     - using email &#x27;tiles&#x27; that can be dragged around instead of just being a list
     - multiple inboxes on the same screen that display these tiles
     - &quot;map&quot; view that displays email tiles&#x2F;threads as a network graph that can be zoomed into or out of, showing greater or less detail
</code></pre>
One thing that&#x27;s struck me is that it&#x27;s very easy to overcomplicate the UI - either too many elements, or the user has to scroll around &#x2F; zoom in and out of the network graph to find emails that are relevant.<p>I do still believe however with recent advances in gaming, graphics, visualisation, and AI&#x2F;ML, there must be some solution out there that&#x27;s elegant, efficient, more intuitive, and pleasing, with regards to reimagining how the inbox loooks.<p>Now on to the questions:<p><pre><code>     (1) What does everyone think?
     (2) Has this been done before? If so, by whom? And what were the factors behind their success&#x2F;failure
     (3) Any thoughts on how to address the problem of the UI being too cluttered?</code></pre>
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karmakaze
I think I might be fine with one inbox but have the system either prompt me
about cleanups or just do them based on confidence.

It can even unsubscribe me from lists I don't actually read, etc.

Basically automate things to keep a clean inbox. Everything in the inbox
should have a purpose, and when served be moved elsewhere.

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wingerlang
Hey.com -might- be doing something similar? They list a bunch of stuff they
are working to fix, but they are very vague about the actual implementation so
who knows.

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Regraph
Thanks for the info. I hadn't heard of them. Have sent them an email.

