E-mail

Stephanie McFarland

Knowledge Management Systems

February 22, 2005

Overview

E-mail as Habitat Personal Information Management Task Management Communication

E-mail Overload

Conversation- and Task-Centric E-mail Designs

Discussion/Questions?

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.”

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

E-mail as Habitat: Organizing and Accessing Information Filters

Folders Sender Organization Project Personal interests (professional or private)

SearchingSorting

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

E-mail Overload

Filters

Folders

Sorting

Searching

Spring cleaning

Tagging …

Is any of this really helping?

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

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 don’t want to file what’s “active”

“I want to keep it in my ‘in’ box, keep it current!”

E-mail Overload

E-mail used for…

Task Management Personal Archiving (filing) Asynchronous Communication (independent, but

concurrent ongoing conversations)

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.”

Sequential and Tree Models of ConversationSequential 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

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

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

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

Improving E-mail

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