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-toface 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)
Searching
Sorting
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
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
Taking E-mail to Task
 Taskmaster system created to “recast email 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
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
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Should e-mail be task-centric?
Conversation-centric?
Which is better?
More features? Less features?