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