Visual Trust Categories for Message Queue Triage
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current message filtering techniques in computing environments often result in coarse granularity, leading to either false positives where desired messages are incorrectly filtered out or false negatives where unwanted messages are not distinguished from desired ones, especially for borderline messages.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a trust category system that visually distinguishes messages based on their trustworthiness, allowing users to triage messages more effectively by emphasizing trusted messages and de-emphasizing suspicious ones, while still including borderline messages in the queue but in a less prominent manner.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If message filtering techniques are applied to identify and filter out unwanted messages, then the accuracy of identification improves, but false positives increase causing legitimate messages to be incorrectly filtered out
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the binary filtering decision into multiple trust categories (trusted, suspicious, untrusted). This segmentation allows messages to be classified into different trust levels rather than a simple filtered/not-filtered binary outcome, thereby reducing false positives while maintaining identification accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different visual presentation qualities to messages based on their trust category. Trusted messages receive prominent visual treatment, suspicious messages receive de-emphasized treatment, and untrusted messages receive neutral treatment. This local differentiation allows users to quickly assess message trustworthiness without losing legitimate messages.
2Reliability
If borderline messages are included in the message queue, then false positives are reduced, but users are exposed to more unwanted messages
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies different visual presentation qualities to messages based on their trust category. Suspicious messages are de-emphasized through visual styling (e.g., different colors, fonts, or positioning) while remaining visible in the queue, allowing users to identify and avoid unwanted messages without them being completely hidden or filtered out.
3Ease of operation
If visual styles are applied to distinguish trust categories, then user understanding of message queue content improves, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs color changes and visual styling to indicate different trust categories. Trusted messages may be displayed in green or with prominent styling, suspicious messages in yellow or with de-emphasized styling, and untrusted messages in neutral colors. This visual differentiation significantly improves user understanding while adding minimal system complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A message queue (e.g., an email mailbox) may comprise messages received from various sources and including various types of content. For respective messages, a trust category may be identified, e.g., a trusted message category comprising messages received from a known source, an untrusted message category comprising messages received from an unverified source, and a suspicious message category comprising messages containing potentially malicious attachments or potentially unwanted content. The message queue may be presented to the user with the messages of each trust category having a visual style that visually distinguishes the trust categories; e.g., trusted messages may be visually emphasized, and suspicious messages may be visually de-emphasized. This manner of distinguishing messages may enable the user to triage the messages of the message queue, and may mitigate the disadvantages of a false positive in the trust level identification (as compared with moving the suspicious message to a different folder).