Read/Unread
Recently I’ve been talking to Bryan about how we can differentiate between Unread and Read messages. Before we were simply using background colors to indicate old vs new. We felt this created too much of a responsibility to mark everything as read, and wanted something more subtle. We decided to leave the background color white no matter what, and simply change the way information is presented in older messages. We also make a subtle but obvious change in the opacity of the message title in older messages.
A message appearing as unread. We display full information, preview the message body, and thumbnail attachments.
The same message appearing as read. We display less information, cut out the message body preview, and summarize attachments.
An even more compressed version of a read message.
For me, it all depends on the source of the message. Some message sources (more typically mailing lists), I don’t typically want to read every message, and the UX you’re mocking up seems like it would be good for that. That said, sometimes I do want to scan the list to see conversation topics that I haven’t yet read but might want to.
For personal mail (eg from friends & family), though, I actually _do_ want to read every message. Missing something may well have negative consequences in my life.
All of this makes me wonder if the read/unread representation wants to be somewhat context sensitive, and different for different sorts of content styles.
Dan: but you’ve already read them; the question is how to avoid reading them *again*.
I’ve always been pretty happy with how gmail does this- if it has been read already, it gets hidden away pretty much altogether- you see the name of the sender and the first line of context, which you can click on to reopen if you want, but otherwise it is completely hidden away to focus on the unread message (or, in the case of a completely read conversation, the last messsage.) This intermediate solution you’re proposing here looks fairly good when the messages involved are short, but if the read message is long, it feels to me like you’re still going to end up scrolling past a whole lot of already-digested information to get to the meat of the matter.