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Understanding Email Use: Predicting Action on a message
Laura A. Dabbish
Jianwei Wang
CSCI6800 Spring 2005
Purposes:
How people choose to reply to, file or delete email messages
Email related behavior as a function of message and user characteristics.
Important for understanding communication technology and development of automated tools to help people manage messages.
Major purposes email serves
Project management, task delegation and reminders
Information exchange, storage and retrieval Scheduling and planning Social communication
Key message content types
Action requests Status updates Reminders Information requests and responses Schedule requests and responses Social content.
Web-based survey
Section one: collect information about the work context, focusing on the nature of the respondent’s job
o The number of projects the respondent works ono Their number of subordinateso Their feeling of time pressure at work
Web-based survey (cont.)
Section two: ask questions about the respondent’s general patterns of email use
o The number of email messages sent and receivedo The number of messages in the email inboxo general email habits
Web-based survey (cont.)
Section three: ask for detailed information about five new non-spam messages in the respondent’s email inbox
o Message content typeo The importance of the messageo Characteristics of the sendero The action taken on the messageo What they did with the message
Survey measures
job complexity message importance sender characteristics message content message actions
Participants
124 of 1100 (11%) completed the survey at Carnegie Mellon University
38 (30.7%) professors and scientists 40 (32.2%) other staff members 46 (37%) graduate or undergraduate students Age from 20 to 57 (average 30)
Basic Email Statistics
Conclusions:
Email usage varies base on the job role. Professors/scientists read more messages per day than students and other staff.
50% have 105 messages or less in inbox. 25% have 1050 or more messages in inbox. 2.5% have 10000 messages or more in inbox
Small inbox size and high number of folders suggests that people file their messages into folders.
Email Habits
Message Content Distribution
Predicting importance of a message
Individual difference Job complexity Sender characteristics Message content type
Actions on a Message
Predicting message reply action
Individual difference Job complexity Sender characteristics Message content type
Conclusions and Implications for HCI
Inform direction of future research in HCI from studies of people’s email behaviors, e.g. the areas of intelligent techniques for email handling and email interface design
High percentage messages filed or left in the inbox suggests that technology to aid in the location and viewing of messages is an important area of future research for email.
Conclusions and Implications for HCI
Features of email messages influence attention to the message.
Message importance influences the message reply.
A user interface that makes the importance of a message visible is useful to help people find messages.
Conclusions and Implications for HCI
Messages with social content, like messages from friends and family members are more likely to receive immediate response.
Message with social content may deserve different treatment in the interface