LEARNINGS: Our prototype is very engaging and fun, and users found the actions and animations to be satisfying breaks from email – more refinement is needed to reconcile the gestures with existing email functionality and mental models. 

STRESS! No emotional catharsis or release; user is unsatisfied STRESS! No sense of progress or that a task has been completed STRESS! No mental break between successive emails STRESSORS: AUDIENCE: Knowledge workers or busy professionals for whom email is so prominent that it has become a soul-sucking routine that does not provide any outlet for emotion and expression 

PROTOTYPE: A lifelike inbox screen with interactive delete gestures & sounds: SLICE [DELETE]: BOMB [MULTIPLE DELETE]: 

TRIAL RESULTS: Users feel sensory gratification – definitely targets our stressors: More modes and gestures to map to specific emotions: Make it clear how the gesture works amongst existing email infrastructure and mental model: “I love it! I hate emails and I want to explode them!” “Blowing up this spam makes me happy” “I feel so satisfied by bombing my emails!” “Dude – this makes emails so much fun” “Can I shred my emails?” “I’d like to have more modes” “I could use a gesture for liking something” “This makes it much easier to get through email” “The action of slicing could be more clear.” “It would be nice to have visual instructions” “Can we archive our emails as another option?” “How can I undo an accidental gesture?” 

NEXT STEPS: Flesh out remaining email functionalities: opening and reading mails, and traversing through them individually Introduce several touchpoints for tutorials & how-to-use Integrate the gestures with existing email mental models of undo & archive, mistake recovery, confirmations, etc. Brainstorm new interaction paradigms that map to other conjured emotions: ie, what if you love an email, and want to save it somewhere special?