Meet the New Earth Class Mail: Folders and Filters

By David Widner, Earth Class Mail

In redesigning Earth Class Mail (the new application will be officially released in mid-June), we knew that if we were to be successful in making the user experience like that of email, we had to give customers the ability to quickly locate and retrieve mail items within their online account, no matter when the items were received and what actions had been taken on them. And we wanted it all to involve no more than a couple of clicks.

Step one (shown below) was letting customers create customizable folders for filing mail, similar to those of the most popular email services.

Step two was the addition of a new “Filter by…” drop-down menu (highlighted below) that lets users sort mail items into such groupings as viewed, unviewed, recently completed scans, all scans, not scanned, and older than 30 days.

When used in tandem with the folders and the “View All” option in the left column of the UI, the filtering menu becomes a powerful search-and-retrieve tool that’s particularly helpful to customers who have accumulated a large inventory of mail and need to find a certain item ASAP.

For example, say a customer needs to locate a scanned document from several months ago for an important meeting, knows the folder in which he filed it, but doesn’t have time to scroll through the hundreds of mail items in that folder. By selecting the folder icon and choosing the “All scans” option in the filter menu, he can display only the items in that folder whose contents have been scanned. He can then click the “Received” column header to show the items in reverse chronological order and then rapidly locate the mail item associated with the document.

Or say he wants to isolate all the items for which he’s currently being charged a monthly storage fee but doesn’t want to search through each folder. All he has to do is click “View All” and then select “Older than 30 days” in the filter menu to get a complete listing of those items in his account.

Next: Shipping in three easy steps

June 2, 2009 | Filed Under Earth Class Mail 

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