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The research program at IBM's® Collaborative User Experience (CUE) group supports an e-mail system used by millions of people. We present three lessons learned from working with real-world enterprise e-mail solutions. First, a pragmatic, system-level approach reveals that e-mail programs are generally used idiosyncratically, often for many differen...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... keeping with our belief that e-mail designs need to be tested as part of a functioning system, we built a thread viewer as a modification to the standard Lotus Notes e-mail template ( Figure 5). This visualization shows messages as square nodes in a tree and displays information on senders and recipients us- ing a dual color scheme. ...
Citations
... Altering Inbox Presentation. In addition to the existing capabilities in email clients for managing presentation, such as moving, hiding, or sorting emails, we asked survey participants to consider potential new presentations of their inbox [14,22,54]. We found many interested in alternative views for email threading. ...
Email management consumes significant effort from senders and recipients. Some of this work might be automatable. We performed a mixed-methods need-finding study to learn: (i) what sort of automatic email handling users want, and (ii) what kinds of information and computation are needed to support that automation. Our investigation included a design workshop to identify categories of needs, a survey to better understand those categories, and a classification of existing email automation software to determine which needs have been addressed. Our results highlight the need for: a richer data model for rules, more ways to manage attention, leveraging internal and external email context, complex processing such as response aggregation, and affordances for senders. To further investigate our findings, we developed a platform for authoring small scripts over a user's inbox. Of the automations found in our studies, half are impossible in popular email clients, motivating new design directions.
... Recent statistics show that 4087 million email accounts exist and 200 billion emails are exchanged worldwide each day (Radicati & Hoang, 2011). It is non-trivial for email systems to provide customized services to users based on the huge amounts of electronic data (Dabbish & Kraut, 2006) (Wattenberg et al., 2005). Therefore, personalized information is utilized for this purpose, e.g. ...
Email classification and prioritization expert systems have the potential to automatically
group emails and users as communities based on their communication
patterns, which is one of the most tedious tasks. The exchange of emails among
users along with the time and content information determine the pattern of
communication. The intelligent systems extract these patterns from an email
corpus of single or all users and are limited to statistical analysis. However, the
email information revealed in those methods is either constricted or widespread,
i.e. single or all users respectively, which limits the usability of the resultant
communities. In contrast to extreme views of the email information, we relax
the aforementioned restrictions by considering a subset of all users as multi-user
information in an incremental way to extend the personalization concept.
Accordingly, we propose a multi-user personalized email community detection
method to discover the groupings of email users based on their structural and
semantic intimacy. We construct a social graph using multi-user personalized
emails. Subsequently, the social graph is uniquely leveraged with expedient
attributes, such as semantics, to identify user communities through collaborative
similarity measure. The multi-user personalized communities, which are
evaluated through di�fferent quality measures, enable the email systems to �filter
spam or malicious emails and suggest contacts while composing emails. The
experimental results over two randomly selected users from email network, as
constrained information, unveil partial interaction among 80% email users with
14% search space reduction where we notice 25% improvement in the clustering
coefficient.
... Such formalisation of knowledge is particularly challenging in geographically distributed collaborative environments (Eckert et al., 2005). In such environments, where organisational productivity takes priority over knowledge codification email is still the generally preferred communication tool of the knowledge workers (Wattenberg et al., 2005). The reason for such practice is that email is embedded in communicative processes: ...
... Consequently, as email captures an increasing share of an organization's total communication volume, individuals progressively appropriate their email client as a habitat in which they spend most of their workday (Roll, 2004). As a consequence, the volume of email in daily practice has increased to the point that many organisations and individuals have argued that the problem is ''email overload'' (Wattenberg et al., 2005) rather than insufficient communication. Despite the downsides of ''email overload'' on work stress and frustration (Mano and Mesch, 2010), there is a potential upside. ...
Purpose
– The paper aims to provide a methodology by which organisational knowledge can be extracted and visualised dynamically over time, providing a glimpse into the knowledge evolution processes that occur within organisations.
Design/methodology/approach
– Recursive analysis of email interactions is offered as a case to account for the knowledge structure evolution related to the different programs of international non-governmental organization (INGO). Several methods are used: analysis of the network expansion to see whether the process is random or uniform is performed, visualisation of the network configuration changes throughout studied time period; and the statistical examination of network formation.
Findings
– The results of the presented study indicate that content structure of electronic knowledge networks exhibits hierarchical and centralised tendencies. The social network analysis results suggest that INGO exhibits non-hierarchical and decentralized structure of the individuals contributing to the discussion lists.
Research limitations/implications
– By providing the means to carry out network evolution analysis of content structure dynamics and social interactions, the presented work provides a means for probabilistically modelling patterns of organisational knowledge evolution.
Practical implications
– The approach allows the exploration of the dynamics of tacit to explicit knowledge, from individual to the group and from informal groups to the whole organisation.
Originality/value
– By displaying the large collection of the key phrases that reflected the evolution of the organisational knowledge structure over the time, organisational emails are placed in meaningful context explaining the language of the organisation and context of knowledge structure evolution.
... A teleological perspective draws attention to the purposeful pursuit of goals. Prior research has found that email is not only 'strikingly diverse' but that it also supports multiple goals (Wattenberg et al., 2005). In DSTO, email was used to support a wide variety of goals such as communication, information management and information sharing. ...
... The engineering industry has widely adopted Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) systems [2] to address information management issues associated with concurrent engineering, such as versioning, modification and access [3]. However, where office productivity is considered, e-mail is still the generally preferred tool [4,5]. Despite its shortcomings [6], e-mail has become the primary mechanism for supporting and coordinating work tasks including file sharing, scheduling meetings, and keeping people informed of project progress [7]. ...
... 1. Personal information needs for resolution of the sender's problems relating to the work product or work process [4,5,12]. ...
... In summary, the purposes or transactions for which emails are sent do not correlate with official job categories. This concurs with the finding that e-mail is used idiosyncratically independent of role [4]. The variation in users' e-mail content may be due to their individual styles of communicating or, more likely, project specific details (e.g., maintaining the relationship between the project and design offices was predominantly via e-mail as time zone differences made telephone communication unpractical). ...
E-mails are, rightly or wrongly, a staple of the information and communication technology for managing work and collaborative activities. This paper examines the value of the content of e-mail at a project level rather than at the often-studied level of the individual user. The dataset consists of e-mails authored by an engineering team associated with a large, complex, long term, systems integration project, typical of the aerospace, marine, and defense sectors. The research applied a qualitative content analysis methodology to classify the content (what the e-mail contains) and purpose (why the e-mail was sent) of the e-mail in the dataset. The results of the content analysis were compared and contrasted with secondary evidence from interviews and project documentation to enable a time-phased analysis. The findings show that classifying e-mail content by the categories of management, information, and problem-solving transactions revealed signatures that align with project phases and, more importantly, problems encountered. Finally, we found that the purpose of e-mail is not necessarily consistent with the designated job role or responsibility of the sender or recipient. This paper contributes to empirical data on the relation between communication and project performance and the changing nature of e-mail communication throughout the lifecycle of a project. The findings point to a new way to leverage e-mail content to “manage by e-mail”.
... In the second step, we read the titles and abstracts to filter away papers that were obviously off target. For example, we excluded the paper "E-mail research: Targeting the enterprise" (Wattenberg, et al., 2005), in which the only occurrence of "overview" in the abstract is in the sentence "Finally, we illustrate these lessons with an overview of CUE research strategies in the context of an extended case study of one specific new technology: Thread Arcs." This resulted in the selection of 60 papers for detailed review (see Table 1 and Appendix 1). ...
Overview is a frequently used notion and design goal in information-visualization research and practice. However, it is difficult to find a consensus on what an overview is and to appreciate its relation to how users understand and navigate an information space. We review papers that use the notion of overview and develop a model. The model highlights the awareness that makes up an overview, the process by which users acquire it, the usefulness of overviews, and the role of user-interface components in developing an overview. We discuss the model in relation to classic readings in information visualization and use it to generate recommendations for future research.
... Another work on email based collaboration discusses lessons learned in using email support for enterprise collaborations [5]. However, this work does not address issues related to automated email based negotiation or the use of email for cooperative activities among enterprises. ...
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) typically rely on emails to interact with other SMEs in a collaborative network. However, with the use of different document standards and interpretation techniques establishing a shared understanding of business documents (or emails) can be difficult and raise interoperability issues. In this paper we introduce Commius - a zero cost enterprise system that aims to achieve seamless interoperability among collaborative SMEs. At the heart of Commius is a semantic alignment mechanism capable of automatically interpreting a document received by the system. However, when the automatic interpretation fails, Commius employs agent- inspired negotiation techniques to help achieve common understanding of the document with other Commius system (installed at sender or collaborative SME). This paper presents details of Commius's email negotiation mechanism with the help of a running scenario that demonstrates how Commius-based negotiation can support SMEs achieve semantic alignment in collaborative networks.
... A second novel characteristic is that they are thread-based. Building on much prior work on email visualization[2,19,20], Gmail offers intrinsic organization, where messages are automatically structured into threaded conversations. Threads potentially help people more easily access related messages. ...
... Rather, users employ a combination of strategies over time[1,11]. Grouping messages together according to conversational threads (i.e., a reply chain of messages on a common topic) has been explored in prior research[2,3,19,20]. Gmail[12]uses threads (rather than individual messages) as the basic organizing unit for email management, although a more recent version also combines the functionality of folders and labels[16]. ...
We all spend time every day looking for information in our email, yet we know little about this refinding process. Some users expend considerable preparatory effort creating complex folder structures to promote effective refinding. However modern email clients provide alternative opportunistic methods for access, such as search and threading, that promise to reduce the need to manually prepare. To compare these different refinding strategies, we instrumented a modern email client that supports search, folders, tagging and threading. We carried out a field study of 345 long-term users who conducted over 85,000 refinding actions. Our data support opportunistic access. People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviors are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, both search and threading promote more effective finding. We present design implications: current search-based clients ignore scrolling, the most prevalent refinding behavior, and threading approaches need to be extended.
... Enhancing coordination needs awareness Collaboration, coordination, and task awareness tools are a natural application for the coordination requirements measure presented in this paper. Part of the research effort of the CSCW community has been on improving traditional tools, such as email and instant messaging, which have become an integral part of work in the vast majority of organizations [3,45]. For instance, the coordination requirements measure could provide a way of identifying the email exchanges that are more relevant given the task interdependencies among individuals. ...
The identification and management of work dependencies is a fundamental challenge in software development organizations. This paper argues that modularization, the traditional technique intended to reduce interdependencies among components of a system, is not a sufficient representation of work dependencies in the context of software development. We build on the idea of congruence proposed by Cataldo et al (10) to examine the relationship between the structure of technical and work dependencies and their impact on software development productivity. Our empirical evaluation of the congruence framework showed that when developers' coordination patterns are congruent with their coordination needs, the resolution time of modification requests was, on average, reduced by 32%. Those findings highlight the importance of identifying the "right" set of product dependencies that drive the coordination requirements among software developers.
... Another approach to this problem is thread detection and visualisation which is now a part of newer email clients (e.g. Gmail), and research prototypes (Bellotti et al., 2003, Tang et al., 2008, Venolia and Neustaedter, 2003, Wattenberg et al., 2005 and more recent products such as Gmail. These thread viewers attempt to reduce inbox 'clutter' by clustering related messages. ...
An implicit, but pervasive view in the information science community is that people are perpetual seekers after new public information, incessantly identifying and consuming new information by browsing the web, and accessing public collections. One aim of this review is to challenge this consumer characterisation which regards information as a public resource containing novel data that we seek out, consume, and then discard. Instead I want to focus on a very different view: where familiar information is used a personal resource that we keep, manage and (sometimes repeatedly) exploit. I call this information curation. I first summarise arguments against the consumer perspective. I then review research on three different information curation processes: keeping, management and exploitation.
