Three Danes re-imagine good ol’ email with Persona

Remember Google Wave, the search giant’s ill-fated attempt at re-imagining good ol’ email communication? The service was famously pulled due to lack of interest, but that didn’t stop others from figuring out better ways to handle email. This right here could be the solution we’ve been yearning for. Marco Triverio, an interaction designer at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, teamed up with his colleagues Ali Seçkin Karayol and Harsha Vardhan on a project dubbed Persona.

In a nutshell, Persona is their take on reinventing an email client that is “both Personal and has personality”, as the tagline says. Be that as it may, Persona has definitely gotten us excited with its focus on simplicity and on the human touch. Per description on their Vimeo page:

Persona is an email client that was designed to change the perception and experience of sending and receiving emails by focusing on People, the Conversations between them and the Knowledge shared in emails today. This is a reaction to the paradigm of emails presented in spread-sheets seen with most email clients, where a focus on presenting data prevails over the need for a personal touch.

The design is optimized for accomplishing tasks with fewer clicks. The handy People view groups messages by sender so you can quickly drill through the history of entire communication with a single contact. Conversation view presents related attachments, messages sent and messages received in one place. Pay especially attention to a birds-eye view of the attachments in the above clip, it’s quite astounding. Apple of course is bringing the iPad’s two-pane mail view to the Lion’s redesigned Mail app, along with advanced smart search filters, the conversation view and other features.

For those wondering when the app will be released, the company has this to say on their Twitter account (@PersonaMail): “For now it is in prototype level with all the functionalities designed. We will post the news [on Twitter].”