You make some excellent points about using email in a support organization. To be fair though, Hum isn't designed to be used by employees in a call center.
Instead, Hum addresses a much more fundamental shift in communication patterns that is already in full swing. Conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more to the point. Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don't even have email addresses.
Hum combines some of the core organization elements of email, like threads and subject lines, with features that many people have come to expect from their more modern IM/text/Twitter client like instant updates, presence, typing indicators, @mentions, etc. It strikes a balance between the two that helps bridge the gap from email to a much faster and more productive medium.
About a year ago I started making a point of sampling all of the teens I found myself in conversation with — family dinners, speaking at high schools, friends' siblings — and asking about their email usage patterns.
While it's true that they don't use email as a primary communication medium (yet) it seems likely that this is because they also don't have jobs (yet) and that it's currently easier to talk to their friends via Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr.
And yet they all have email addresses, because otherwise there's no way to access most of the stuff on the web. You have to sign up, and unless you're talking about a phone-centric app like WhatsApp, there's no practical way to avoid email.
Even if you can login with Facebook Connect, you still need email to use Facebook.
So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
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As for my referencing a support operation delaying email, I used it as an example because I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't a half-baked notion based on anecdotal evidence from one guy.
Meanwhile, conversations are most certainly NOT getting shorter. Each message in an exchange might itself be quite short, but the conversation itself really never ends.
Ask yourself what is more distracting: a long email or a series of 80 individual "short, to the point" texts, where each one vibrates your pocket and you have no idea when the next one is coming. You already know the answer. Often times you give up trying to do anything else and just stare at the messaging interface, waiting for the next message/fix to arrive.
Don't get me wrong; I use iMessage constantly and vastly prefer texting to calling people for most trivial things. But I also gave up IRC and ICQ (dating myself) cold turkey because eventually I was forced to acknowledge that it was holding me back in life. It was not more productive; it was incredibly counter-productive.
To throw it in, the first one or two years using it email used to feel like something that has to be replied timely, and after a while it appears that's not viable. IMs feel the same now, it's supposed to be instant, but putting it away for a while and dealing with discussions in batches every hour or two hours becomes an option.
If urgent matters may come through, checking the messages only when two or three come in rapid succession is a good heuristic.
> So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
Well, of course teens have email, it's just not a primary method of communication for them (as you admit). To them, email is just how they sign up for 'real' (to them, at least) methods of communication.
This may as well be the same as 'teens don't have email'
It's rather hard to believe that any number of them wouldn't have an email address, considering everything they would use in place of it requires an email address to sign up for.
Are they mostly talking to friends via email? Probably not--I don't think that's ever been the case with teens--but I can't imagine that they just flat out do not have an account anywhere.
> Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don't even have email addresses.
Because most teens don't have any need to be productive. This isn't a sign that the times are changing, this is a sign that the people you are using as a focus group have no need for the type of communication email facilitates.
IM / text conversations are shorter but they also drift from one topic to the other.
Generally chats are grouped based on people while emails are grouped based on topics. Categorizing them with subjects wouldnt really be practical.
Instead, Hum addresses a much more fundamental shift in communication patterns that is already in full swing. Conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more to the point. Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don't even have email addresses.
Hum combines some of the core organization elements of email, like threads and subject lines, with features that many people have come to expect from their more modern IM/text/Twitter client like instant updates, presence, typing indicators, @mentions, etc. It strikes a balance between the two that helps bridge the gap from email to a much faster and more productive medium.