The Birdseye Project

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But, they are most definitely interrupting your work flow and having a negative impact on your productivity. How negative? According to research done at Kent University, participants took 17% longer to complete a task when interruptions like smartphone notifications and phone calls were introduced.

And I totally get it. My phone and iPad are constantly lighting up throughout the day notifying me of some new message that needs to be dealt with. Each time I come back to the original task, I need a moment or two to reorient myself, collect my thoughts and jump back in. Culminated throughout the day this is a huge time suck.

So, here’s my proposal. Turn off Lock Screen notifications.

Now, you don’t have to do this for every single application. I personally like see when someone has liked a post on Instagram or when there’s a sale happening on Jack Threads. And that’s just it. Maybe I just take crappy pictures, but these types of notifications aren’t happening every five minutes throughout the day. They are intermittent.

Even if you turn lock screen notifications off, you can still be updated on what you’ve missed by leaving banner notifications on. By taking this approach, you gain back control over when you are notified since the notifications are displayed only once you decide to actually pick up and unlock the device.

Your lock screen should be sacred.

Maximizing productivity while minimizing jolting intrusion is something we’ve been thinking about a lot at Birdseye as we work on a notification system of our own. We have a few different ideas that you may or may not (wink wink) see an iteration of soon.

But for now, take a step back, increase your productivity and join me in a Lock Screen Revolution.

Fast Company recently had a feature about how companies are adapting to the visual nature of social media and the internet. The feature cited Instagram, Pinterest, and opinions from media, agencies, and commerce, it made us wonder - is email being left out?

1. Text is Stressful

Email’s current design presents a user’s inbox as an imposing block of text.  With most of the actual content hidden in the messages, users spend an extraordinary amount of effort clicking in and out over and over again.

2. Skim Through Content

A picture is worth a thousand words. That alone gives you an idea of how much more efficient visual email can be.  Displaying email as dynamic images invites users to fly through their inbox, taking it all in at a glance.

3. Forget Email

The purpose of visual email isn’t just an inbox experience that’s faster and has a unique appearance. When you focus on images, something special happens.  You can immerse yourself in your inbox, creating an entirely new experience.  One that (dare we say) almost lets you forget completely that you’re even looking at email. 

Ask 5 different people how they manage their inboxes and you’ll get 5 different responses. Some treat their inboxes as a to do list, while others swear by their filters and filters for their filters. When creating the visual inbox that makes Birdseye unique, this is a question that we had to vist and revisit multiple times.  

Here are some highlights from conversations with our team members.

Garland: I keep my email open on a tab all day, and check it periodically. I (almost obsessively) filter my email. I use filters for companies I do work for, with sub filters of projects. Emails from my friends, and family each have their own filter. Filters help automatically delete things I don’t care to read. :)

Ted: I immediately answer work emails as evidenced by this reply. Personal emails take a day or two. I guess inbox zero is possible, but I agree with Frahad that it’s not necessary, and doesn’t automatically mean that you’re more organized. I guess the real priority is finding priority and relevance to email and focusing on that.

Adam:My email response time depends on who sends them. - If it’s job, school, or friends ASAP. Family stuff takes 24 hours at best, 3 days at worst. Inbox zero is possible but is more a question of personal preference I agree with whoever that author was that stated Inbox Zero can feel lonely/like you’re unimportant.

HJ: I’ve never really used email as a to-do list. I have an odd habit of writing to do lists on napkins. I also don’t know how to use filters.. And yet I usually reply so quickly, I’m almost always at email zero. 

We’ve created a GitHub repository filled with some of the unique JavaScript that’s currently used in Birdseye to parse out the Open Graph tags.  With these scripts you should be able to create custom actions in your own apps or projects, just by inserting a few lines of Open Graph meta data.

In the future we plan on giving you some more tools (possibly a sample app) to try out these scripts in different ways.  

Good luck!

The problems with email have been discussed ad nauseum. Why? Because while the amount of email we receive continues to grow and the devices we consume it on continue to change, the design of email has hardly changed in 30 years.

But, considering you’re here reading this, you’ve probably heard that all before.

So what is Birdseye about?

In 2012, one of our engineers attended Pycon in California and listened to Paul Graham give a talk about what he thought were some frighteningly ambitious startup ideas. Not surprisingly, email was one of those ideas.

We ourselves feel the strain of email everyday and wanted to take on this challenge of making it better, but it’s a massive task to do from scratch. We decided to break down the problem into smaller pieces and attack it more iteratively in the open, collaborating with others who care about this and doing interesting things too.

Birdseye v1 is our first step.

We tried to do three things with this first version…

First, we started with one specific device, the iPad. How we use iPads is different from how we use a desktop, yet the experience of mail on an iPad is much the same as on desktop. Most email apps on an iPad are just ported over from desktop versions. Consuming content in a casual way on an iPad seemed something to focus more on.

Second, we realized the format of the content in our inbox was more visual and more diverse than just text between people. We wanted to give people a better at-a-glance view of their email’s content without having to go into each message one and a time. As emails come in we understand their format and display it in the most visual possible way. If there’s a photo attached, Birdseye surfaced that image larger in the inbox. If there’s a newsletter we strip away the junk and show you the content. Etc.

Third, we wanted to create easy ways for people to take action on their email. We think for most emails types we can determine one or two key actions people would take to deal with the message. We’ve assigned these “quick actions” for each message format. For example, the quick action on a newsletter would be “unsubscribe” or on a calendar invite “accept and add to calendar” etc. And using Open Graph we can keep adding more actions for more formats as we go.

Overall, our goal is to try and take the anxiety out of viewing your email and make a more zen-like experience tailored for how we use tablets.

We think a lot of people are doing interesting new things with email and we’ve tried to spotlight those apps and we’d like to invite you to give us feedback and share in the discussion about how to improve email.

This is just a start but we hope you’ll join us.