AOL Alto Aims High in Hopes of Becoming Next Email UI Paradigm
By Karla Robinson
October 22, 2012
October 22, 2012
- AOL has launched a beta version of its new Alto email service that works with existing email platforms and promises to “revolutionize how we interact with email,” reports Fast Company.
- Bill Wetherell, senior director of UX design at AOL, talks about today’s “inbox fatigue,” which has resulted from a continued lack of innovation.
- “Yes, there have been improvements — in search, contacts, storage size — but they’ve been incremental at best, and based on an outmoded architecture of lists, folders, and more lists,” notes the article. “Alto is a radical rethinking of inbox design, and features a stripped-down interface that’s spruced up by visual cues and intuitive navigation tools.”
- “In Alto, many messages and files are automatically and neatly aggregated into tiles of common categories: for photos, attachments, social, daily deals, and retail. So, for example, say you get an email offer from Amazon or iTunes — Alto will automatically pull those messages into the retailers stack, seamlessly and without hassle,” Fast Company explains.
- “In the social stack, notifications are culled from Twitter, LinkedIn, Path, Facebook, and more. But Alto goes the extra mile to display infographics to help users navigate through fragmented social network updates.”
- Users can easily create new stacks and a “skip inbox” function that sends certain emails straight into a stack. The left hand message column has a “people” tab, which shows contact information and a social profile of email correspondents.
- “The colors are softer on the eyes than Gmail’s scheme; there is less junk mail; and the myriad icons that normally overwhelm inbox screens (stars, trashcans, checkboxes, numbers) are gone, save a select few that appear upon mousing over a particular message,” suggests the article. “It’s a clean experience reminiscent of your simple, thin iPhone email message list.”
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