Having structured conversations

This blog is part of a series called Challenging Communication Norms

Plum Mail's messages are rich and interactive allowing you to have structured conversations within them. You can highlight questions, create shared pins, select text to reply inline against, extract tasks and link to individual paragraphs in specific messages for deep contextual referencing.

All of these features are discoverable as you type out your message.

Feedback ranges from excitement to fascination as the user uncovers the functionality inside an otherwise perfectly ordinary looking email.

These features have many uses so providing training is futile. Instead, we allow the user to discover the feature and therefore slowly influence communication behaviour towards structuring conversations.

Enhancing existing expectations

Email users already ask questions, reply inline and use copy/paste except in Plum Mail, those actions come with benefits.

When a user types a question, Plum Mail automatically highlights it.
If you copy and paste something (from any conversation), Plum Mail automatically builds a rich link to that exact paragraph.
Plum Mail also creates an additional input for you to comment on those lines directly.

In traditional email clients, users manually attempt to bring order and structure to email conversations. In Plum Mail, the exact same behaviour is enhanced and reinforced with feature discovery.

Plum Mail delights users as they discover these rich features and allow them to uncover the value of structured conversations for themselves.