Persona has been designed and developed in 9 days by Marco Triverio, Ali Seckin Karayol, and Harsha Vardhan Ramesh Babu at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID, www.ciid.dk) during the Graphical User Interfaces class held by Timm Kekeritz and Frank Rausch (www.raureif.net).
Persona is an email client that was designed to change the perception and experience of sending and receiving emails by focusing on people, the conversations between them and the knowledge shared in emails today.
This is a reaction to the paradigm of emails presented in spreadsheets seen with most email clients, where a focus on presenting data prevails over the need for a personal touch.
Design process and design mantras
Conversations view
Quick replying to a message
Persona
Persona has gained an incredible amount of attention on the media and it has been featured on some highly regarded websites -with extremely positive reviews.
"Persona email client revolutionizes email" - iThinkDifferent
"A refreshing new approach to email" - TSH
"A client that is both Personal and has personality"
Conversation, People, and Attachment View.
Persona allows you to see your emails the way that suits you best. Fewer clicks are needed to reach where you need to be.
Conversation View focuses on ongoing discussions presenting related attachments, messages sent, and messages received in one convenient place.
“People View” groups messages by sender and allows retrieval of emails by sender instead of by subject, date, and so on.
Attachment View is a revolutionary, unified, and seamless birds-eye view on the media shared via email. Attachment View presents shared YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Facebook links alongside actual attachments.
The user can choose any of the 3 views as a default switching only when necessary to a more useful temporary view. Check out the video and photos for more information.
"Question, Dissect, Understand, Rebuild"
The 'Persona' team asked the following questions during the development of the UI:
- What are the rituals behind writing/receiving emails today?
- What is the importance of the Social construct behind communication and also about what is being communicated?
- Based on the above, what are the most important and necessary functional elements in a UI, needed to create a meaningful and simple email experience?
Thus in asking these questions, critically assessing the graphical and interactive framework behind existing clients and through multiple iterations, 'Persona' was created.
People view
Composing a new email
Attachment view
One of the initial concepts
Some of the initial sketches