gmailvalet com: managing email overload through parsimonious,...

GMAILVALET.COM: MANAGING EMAIL OVERLOAD THROUGH PARSIMONIOUS, ACCOUNTABLE CROWDSOURCING  

Valet Crowdsourcing!“You would never hand your car keys to a stranger …unless he was a valet parking driver. ” We introduce valet crowdsourcing that seeks to provide (i) parsimony and (ii) accountability in access control: (i) Parsimoniously give crowd assistants just enough access to help with most of the work without giving them unrestricted access to all user data. (ii) To establish accountability, make access boundaries transparent to all parties and design appropriate access logs so that any transgressions are recorded and crowd workers are held responsible for their actions.

STANFORD HCI GROUP Nicolas Kokkalis, info@gmailvalet.com www.gmailvalet.com T. Köhn, C. Pfeiffer, D. Chornyi, Michael S. Bernstein, Scott R. Klemmer

Parsimony!

Accountability!

GmailValet.com!GmailValet is a crowd-powered email client that applies the valet approach. It connects you with an online human assistant, without sharing your password.

Assistants cannot search old emails, can only see last 100 threads. Users can further refine white-list and blacklist access.

Visible & not seen Not Visible Explanation Visible & seen

Assistant actions recorded Complete Historic Log

Evaluation!•  28 participants, 3 assistants from oDesk •  Within subjects, 3 conditions, counter-balanced:

Control, Self, Valet •  Measured completion rate of ground-truth

labeled tasks in the inbox •  Survey follow up to explore reactions to valet

crowdsourcing

Contributions!•  First use of crowdsourced expert assistants to

support Personal Information Management

•  Valet crowdsourcing: balance parsimony and accountability for private data

•  The GmailValet system for email task management

•  Empirical results that crowd assistants manage information accurately

Results: Effectiveness!

•  2x tasks completed in Valet condition

•  Assistants increasingly accurate overtime (85% at end of study)

•  Cost $1.78 /user /day (at $8/hour wage)

Results: Valet Sharing!

•  93% of participants shared filtered emails with the assistants (in contrast to the 4% reported in our formative work)

•  Only 3 participants said they would stop using email valet for privacy reasons

•  18 participants initially felt uncomfortable trusting an assistant. But, 11 felt more comfortable with the service over time

“Originally I did not share emails from my boyfriend, but I changed that after realizing he sent me emails with tasks for me to do”

– Study Participant