Email

1
E-mail

• Stephanie McFarland
• Knowledge Management Systems
• February 22, 2005

2
Overview

• E-mail as Habitat
• Personal Information Management
• Task Management
• Communication
• E-mail Overload
• Conversation- and Task-Centric E-mail Designs
• Discussion/Questions?

3
Some Thoughts About E-mail

• E-mail is the major means of non-face-to-face
  communication.
• E-mail has evolved to a point where it is now
  used for multiple purposes.
• E-mail is co-opted by its users for many
  information management functions.
• E-mail is the central place from which work is
  received, managed, and delegated in
  organizations.

4
E-mail as Habitat Information and Task
Management

• Attachments allow flow/exchange of documents and
  collaboration
• Address book Modern Rolodex
• Alerts keep e-mail users tuned in
• Sending reminders to self as a way of managing
  schedules
• Priority labels assign importance to info
• Calendar keeps track of deadlines, meetings
• Folders compartmentalize information and keep
  track of tasks

5
E-mail as Habitat Organizing and Accessing
Information

• Filters
• Folders
• Sender
• Organization
• Project
• Personal interests (professional or private)
• Searching
• Sorting

6
E-mail as Habitat Factors Affecting Personal
Information Management

• Status/position
• Managers use filtering, searching more due to
  the volume of e-mail
• Concept of paper trail
• Experience
• More e-mail use leads to more e-mail use
• Organization
• Culture affects frequency and function of e-mail
  use

7
E-mail Overload

• Filters
• Folders
• Sorting
• Searching
• Spring cleaning
• Tagging
• Is any of this really helping?

8
E-mail Overload

• E-mail users clearly feel overwhelmed and
  daunted by the time it takes to deal with all the
  work coming in through this medium. Taking
  Email to Task
• Certain individuals experienced major problems
  in reading and replying to e-mail in a timely
  manner, with backlogs of unanswered e-mail, and
  in finding information in e-mail systems.
  Email Overload

9
E-mail Overload

• Issues with trying to manage e-mail
• Alphabetical ordering of folders
• If filtered, new e-mails are easy to miss
• Searching takes too long
• Users may not remember folder labels
• Folders too small (one or two items)
• Users dont want to file whats active
• I want to keep it in my in box, keep it
  current!

10
E-mail Overload

• E-mail used for
• Task Management
• Personal Archiving (filing)
• Asynchronous Communication (independent, but
  concurrent ongoing conversations)

11
E-mail Conversations

• A mismatch between the user interfaces for
  email clients and user needs for handling email.
• Messages should be viewed as elements of a
  conversation rather than as independent
  elements.
• Viewing messages as conversations will
  provide better local context, which can help one
  better understand the meaning of the message.

12
Sequential and Tree Models of Conversation

• Sequential
• Which of these two messages was sent first?
• Which messages were sent before this one?
• Which messages were sent after this one?

• Tree
• Which message is the root of the conversation
  tree?
• Which message is this one a reply to?
• Does this message have any replies?
• Which messages are replies to this one?

Mixed-Model E-mail Client answers all seven
questions at once
13
(No Transcript)
14
Taking E-mail to Task

• Taskmaster system created to recast e-mail as
  task management and embedding task-centric
  resources directly in the client
• User studies with Outlook and Eudora
• Found that number of threads one is tracking and
  the length of intervals between messages in those
  threads produced a sense of overload more than
  volume/quantity of email

15
Thrasks

• Interdependent tasks (tasks with obligations that
  also depend upon the to-dos of others) that make
  up threads of message files, links and drafts
• Taskmaster supports collections of these
  thrasks related incoming messages are grouped
  together based on analyzing message data
• Incoming and outgoing messages are viewed
  together

16
(No Transcript)
17
Taskmaster In Practice

• Users stopped using it because of missing
  features (printing, formatting)
• Problems with PC compatability
• Equality for all content documents and links
  as first-class citizens displayed in the
  preview pane

18
Improving E-mail

• Should e-mail be task-centric?
• Conversation-centric?
• Which is better?
• More features? Less features?