Cycle Mail
A desktop email client concept that keeps all mail in one date-sorted stream and lets you send any message ahead to the day you need it.
Day by day, business email stacks up, and inbox zero, we believed, is not the right concept for everyone. Cycle is a concept for a desktop email client for business users that keeps every message in a single inbox, sorted by date: mail set aside for later at the top, then the unseen, then the processed. You scroll through one stream, and the messages that need handling today stay in focus.
The review button (»Wiedervorlage«) is a new interface element we combined from a button, a slider and a calendar. Hover over it and it becomes a slider for relative times such as today, in one day or in five days; click the time label and a calendar opens with that period already highlighted. The mail then slides to its date in the inbox, marked with a small review icon, and comes back into focus when it is due.
The list and the mail view are connected, and both scroll endlessly, made for quick browsing and skimming. A quick reply opens on top of the current mail, so you can keep scrolling and refer back to the stream while you write, or reply in a new window instead. For power users, an omnipresent filter bar finds mails, people and files and saves its settings as bookmarks; pick a file type and the mail view becomes a simple media browser of attachments with resizable thumbnails. Our walkthrough follows Miranda, a wedding planner tracking down the photo of a cake that a couple loved at another wedding, which explains all the cakes and engagement photos in the screens.
Florian Schulz, Gunnar Friedrich and I designed Cycle in Prof. Boris Müller’s course “Re-Mail 2012” at FH Potsdam in the winter semester 2011/12, the same semester as Logbook, also with Florian; Gunnar and I had worked together on LiquiData the summer before, and years later I worked with Boris on Schaufenster. We began with interviews with heavy email users and heard about inboxes flooded daily, lost overview across several accounts, the need to pre-sort quickly by keyboard, and important functions buried too deep, since not all of our experts were computer experts; many of our ideas went down well when we took them back to the experts. In 2021 I put the microsite back online on GitHub under the line “Email reimagined in 2012 – ahead of its time”; the German process documentation is on Incom.
Looking back, what stays with me is how much of it email clients adopted years later: sending a mail later or in two days, and moving a mail out of the inbox so it returns the next day, the way Gmail’s snooze works today.