octamail product concept 5th august 07
DESCRIPTION
This is a product concept for a new type of email service. The concept emerged out of a personal need for better email management and classification... This email system would enable holding multiple profiles and multiple inboxes under each of the profiles. Indeed, a similar feature (though not such an advanced one) of 'multiple inboxes' has just been introduced by gmail. Also, the feature of multiple profiles has been introduced in a social networking website called Moli.com which launched sometime in early 2008.TRANSCRIPT
Octamail – A product concept for our email service
Narrating two events surrounding the current way of using email accounts:
Narrating the same events using Octamail:
Scene 1: Leaving a professional friend’s place
Me: Chal see you. Bye. Keep writing.Friend: Sure. But I forgot your id.Me: [email protected]: Oh okay. I got it. You’ve got mine?Me: Yeah. [email protected]?Friend: Right.Me: Chal then. See you sometime.
Post this conversation
After a few days, I receive an email from this person regarding some professional matter. I like to be a little systematic and therefore on many occasions I use tagging. I tag this email as such.
My email account is now full of tagged emails. Sometimes I don’t know which to apply and I don’t remember which all tags I have.
Scene 2: Chanced upon an old classmate and now about to take leave
Me: Chal see you. Bye. Let’s keep in touch.Friend: Sure. What’s your id?Me: [email protected]: Oh okay. It’s the same one…Me: Yeah right. What about you?Friend: [email protected]: Okay. Friend: I’ll send you a mail immediately. So you’ll get my id. Bye!
Post this conversation
My friend sends me a buzz email on [email protected].
I use [email protected] for a professional purposes while [email protected] is used for personal emails. I check both accounts regularly, almost daily.
Scene 2: Chanced upon an old classmate and now about to take leave
Me: Chal see you. Bye. Let’s keep in touch.Friend: Sure. What’s your id?Me: [email protected]: Oh okay. It’s the same one…Me: Yeah right. What about you?Friend: [email protected]: Okay. Friend: I’ll send you a mail immediately. So you’ll get my id. Bye!
Post this conversation
My friend sends me a buzz email on [email protected].
I am able to access, both [email protected] and [email protected] on the same interface. Saves me the trouble opening different email accounts. By default the mails get classified.
Scene 1: Leaving a professional friend’s place
Me: Chal see you. Bye. Keep writing.Friend: Sure. But I forgot your id.Me: [email protected]: Oh okay. I got it. You’ve got mine?Me: Yeah. [email protected]?Friend: Right.Me: Chal then. See you sometime.
Post this conversation
After a few days, I receive an email from this friend regarding some professional matter. It shows in my [email protected].
I need not tag any of my emails now. Because they anyway fall in the email accounts meant for different purposes.
Below are some statistics related to emailing. Clearly Yahoo is the most preferred email service and Gmail and Rediff are distant second and third. Rediff however is significantly losing its ground and so is Hotmail. Other competitors do not have any significant share. Zapakmail and Indiatimes have launched new services. However, there’s very little to differentiate.
The following two tables of statistics are quite significant in their import. It’s common to keep 2 or 3 email accounts.
A staggering 85% of email users use two or more than two email accounts.
It’s quite a common phenomenon to observe people using multiple email accounts for different purposes. It was also observed in a diagnostic study conducted by summer intern Saurabh Khatri where he asked about 20 respondents some questions regarding their email usage habits. Barring one or two respondents, all of them said they were using multiple email accounts and for different purposes.
This fact raises two questions: Are the current email accounts not equipped with features through which
emails can be classified into different categories (based on the purposes they serve)?
o Answer: Definitely they have such features.
If current email accounts have such features as filtering, categorizing, flagging and tagging why aren’t people using them? What is stopping them or hindering them?
o Answer: Perhaps it’s too cumbersome each to put a tag to an email. Perhaps it’s time-consuming too. Perhaps people just aren’t aware of these services; that also explains that since they can’t use these features they open multiple email accounts which in turn results in opening two or three email accounts every time you have to check mails.
Thus there are two ways in which people try to manage or mismanage their emails:
1. Try using tagging (in gmail) or flagging (in yahoo) or filters (in gmail or rediff) to classify their emails. There’s no end - cumbersome.
2. Try opening different email accounts. Inconvenient and cumbersome.
Current methods of sorting aren’t the best as seen from the stats and even from our general observations; observe the way we use our own email accounts. We want them to be more systematic but we’ve never been able to match up with the amount of emailing we do. Also, we do not want to open 3 or 4 email accounts every now and then. It’s distracting and cumbersome. Here, Octamail comes to the rescue. It is nothing but two simple intuitive improvisations on the current way of using multiple email accounts.
The following diagrams explain the change:
Handling Emails
Traditional Way - 1(Post-receipt sorting of emails)
Create one email account for all purposes
Receive and check emails
Tag or Filter
Keep doing it until you are tired and confused.
Handling Emails
Traditional Way - 2(Pre-receipt sorting of emails but through inconvenient multiple email accounts)
Create multiple email accounts for different purposes with different logins and passwords
Receive and check emails in different email accounts.
Open these accounts everyday and endure the inconvenience if you are an avid email user.
Handling Emails
Octamail Way(Pre-receipt sorting of emails through multiple email accounts but with the convenience of one interface)
Create multiple email accounts for different purposes with one login and password.
Give out email ids as per the purpose
Receive and check emails of all email accounts on one interface.
Convenient, more systematic through a simple innovation
Indicative Interface
Welcome Siddharth! Octamail.in
Inbox (3) [email protected] Inbox 3 unread mails Create a new email account Settings SignoutStarred You can make 4 more email accounts
Chats [email protected] Inbox 2 unread mailsSent MailDrafts [email protected] Inbox 5 unread mailsAll MailSpam [email protected] Inbox 1 unread mailsDeleted Items
Active
Activate
Activate
Activate
Marketing
Of course, marketing can be done in many ways. One email inbox could be given by default to a person where he only receives discount offers/promotional offers from on various brands. Initially, this could induce the users to use this email service more often and generate the necessary word of mouth.
Over-all
Executed carefully, this kind of email service could put us right there in the big league. On an informal level, we’ve discussed with this many friends and colleagues and everybody has given really positive and eager response.