Email overload Exploring Personal Information Management of Email

Email overload Exploring Personal Information Management of Email Whittaker and Sidner(1996) Presented by: José P. González-Brenes

Motivation • Email is the most successful computer application • Popularity – high daily volumes of email being sent and received

Windows NT Mail Client

Email • Designed for asynchronous communication, but used for: – – – – Document delivery and archiving Work task delegation and task tracking. Storing personal names and addresses Sending reminders (? ) Asking for assistance ! Scheduling appointments Handling technical support queries Etc…

Interactions in the workplace • Multiple interactions in order to complete a task. • “Context-switching” and multi-tasking • Does email communication have these characteristics? How is it handled in email?

Email Overload • The use of email for functionality that it was not designed for.

The Study

Participants • 20 workers, 1 -2 hours questions – – 4 high level managers 5 first level managers 9 professional workers w/o mgmt responsibility 2 administrative assistants – 2 - 15 years exposure to email, different fields • 18 inboxes (quantitative data)

Email Overload The Problem

The Good • Allows collaboration across time and distance. • Sometimes more appropriate than other technologies and even face-to-face communication

The Bad • Some people experienced major problems in reading and replying to email in a timely manner – backlogs of unanswered email – finding information

The Ugly • The mean number of inbox items is 2482. • The mean number of filed items is 858. • Touch Model rejected: People “touch” email more than once!

RADAR Project

METAL • Message to Task Linking • The NLP/Email team has constructed a general architecture for: – message storage – annotation – understanding

NLP/Email • Rule-based and statistically-trained recognizers for the semantic content of email - people, places, times, etc.

Understanding Email Blake, My name is incorrectly spelled in the site as Shawanda North instead of Shania North, which is entirely unacceptable. This is as big a fault to me as if someone had listed you as Brian instead of Blake, just because the first letter is the same doesn't mean it is the same as your name. This should be changed immediately! S. North Looking at the infomation sypplied on the upcoming confrenence, i noticed that there was an error in the list. Could you please correct this address, changing it to xx@yy. org, to the contact information so that people can contact me if they so choose? ~Shin Yi

Understanding Email Blake, My name is incorrectly spelled in the site as Shawanda North instead of Shania North, which is entirely unacceptable. This is as big a fault to me as if someone had listed you as Brian instead of Blake, just because the first letter is the same doesn't mean it is the same as your name. This should be changed immediately! S. North Looking at the infomation sypplied on the upcoming confrenence, i noticed that there was an error in the list. Could you please correct this address, changing it to xx@yy. org, to the contact information so that people can contact me if they so choose? ~Shin Yi

Semantic Features

Possible Applications • Have the computer organize similar pending activities for you Sort by task? • Applications that build on top on understanding users’ activities

More cool ideas Play FELDSPAR video here : ¬)

Explaining the Inbox

Breaking the Touch Model • To-do’s • To-read’s • Messages of indeterminate status – A surprise phone call, pretend you have read it, while reading it in the course of the call (!!!)

Why People Don’t File? • Filing is a difficult task: – which folder is appropriate? – Do I need a new folder? – Might “fit” in several folders • Forgetting where it was filed is worse than leaving it in the inbox • Folder names don’t mean anything after some time • Folders can’t be too small or too big

Strategies

Strategies People Use • Spring Cleaners • Frequent Filers • No Filers

Frequent Filers • It maybe that frequent filing is only possible for lower volumes of incoming email • Managers receiving higher volumes with less time to process email may not be in a position to exploit frequent filing • Experienced the least problems!

Spring Cleaners • Spring cleaners have strong feelings about the disorder of their inboxes: they use terms like “disgust” to describe their reactions to their inbox

About the subjects • Managers were more likely to receive greater volumes of email ( p < 0. 005 ) • Are managers less likely to be frequent filers? – No strong evidence of direct relationship (t > 0. 05)

Authors’ Conclusions

We must… • Redesign email clients to support: – Filing – Task management –…

Take into consideration • Reduce inbox clutter • Don’t compromise visual reminding – Seeing that email that we have to handle – Information has to be available!

Other tools • Threading – with partial filing • Clustering