Question

I’m designing a web application – prototyping and wireframing the main pages so I’ve got an idea of what it will do. I’m struggling on how to display my data to users.

We basically provide them with an email inbox, a phone message system and a fax system. This means three different types of data – one is textual, one is audio and one is visual. They share some common properties however, and the point of our service is to unify users communications, so it makes sense to combine them.

Mashing the data together in any way results in a very sparse summary, the only information they share is the sender and the date. So after spending 5 hours agonising over design decisions I thought I’d open it up. The options we’re leaning to is

1. Show a ‘unified inbox’ with a link to view the full item details on a per line basis
2. Drop the idea of a dashboard and just have an individual inbox in the web interface for each service. We can display the number of new messages on the tab for the service so they know there are new messages
3. Show a very simple summary as the dashboard, merely showing the number of new ‘communications’ in each of the users inboxes (fax, email, voice).

What is best from a design perspective? We could conduct user testing, but it’s a shoestring startup, so the costs of mocking up 3 complete UI’s is prohibitive at this point.

Answer 1

I’m confused what the question is, should we suggest the UI layout? Or are you looking for ideas on how to prototype / play around with a look / solution?

I use Balsamic Mockups for all my UI designs, spend some time laying it out, and it is a great way to visualize what you want, and it adds a level of interactivity to it as well.

Hopefully thats somewhat along the lines of what you were asking ;).

Otherwise I would go with something like you mentioned above:

1. Show a summary / dashboard page showing say last 10 of the last messages (voice / email / fax).
2. Show # of new items per service, and go from there.