Kyle Rector
Joshua Hailpern
ABSTRACT
Email is the primary method of digital communication for most people, but the overwhelming quantity has led to a poverty of attention. Existing manual and automatic solutions that aim to save important emails from falling through the cracks have begun to address this problem, but may increase user workload, sacrifice efficiency, or fail to identify high value communications. In response, we developed MinEMail, an alert system that uses a text message (SMS) to remind and notify users of critical emails that may have been missed or forgotten. MinEMail provides an alert infrastructure as well as accurately labeling and predicting which emails are critical, and when and how they need to be addressed. To motivate our system, we also present an up-front study with 777 participants that aims to understand the state and limitations of email and SMS in enterprise. We conduct an experience sampling study of over 3000 emails in order to construct MinEMail's predictive models. Finally, we present the results from a 15 user ecologically valid real-world deployment of MinEMail in enterprise.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
MinEMail
- Mailbox - Put Email In Its Place. http://www.mailboxapp.com/, 2013. {Online; accessed 28-August-2013}.Google Scholar
- Ways of asking questions and making requests - MacMillan Dictionary. http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/thesaurus-category/british/Ways-of-asking-questions-and-making-requests, 2013. {Online; accessed 28-August-2013}.Google Scholar
- Aberdeen, D., Pacovsky, O., and Slater, A. The learning behind gmail priority inbox. In LCCC: NIPS 2010 Workshop on Learning on Cores, Clusters and Clouds (2010).Google Scholar
- Albakour, M.-D., Kruschwitz, U., and Lucas, S. Sentence-level attachment prediction. In Advances in Multidisciplinary Retrieval. Springer, 2010, 6--19. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alberts, I., and Forest, D. Email pragmatics and automatic classification: A study in the organizational context. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, 5 (2012), 904--922. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Altman, D. G. Practical statistics for medical research, vol. 12. CRC Press, 1991.Google Scholar
- Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M., and Smith, I. Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI 2003, ACM (2003), 345--352. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Brooke, J. SUS - A quick and dirty usability scale. Usability evaluation in industry (1996).Google Scholar
- Buthpitiya, S., Madamanchi, D., Kommaraju, S., and Griss, M. Mobile context-aware personal messaging assistant. In Mobile Computing, Applications, and Services. Springer, 2010, 254--272.Google Scholar
- Byrt, T. How good is that agreement? Epidemiology 7, 5 (1996), 561.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dabbish, L. A., Kraut, R. E., Fussell, S., and Kiesler, S. Understanding email use: predicting action on a message. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI 2005, ACM (2005), 691--700. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dredze, M., Wallach, H. M., Puller, D., Brooks, T., Carroll, J., Magarick, J., Blitzer, J., Pereira, F., et al. Intelligent email: Aiding users with ai. In AAAI (2008), 1524--1527. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fleiss, J. L., Levin, B., and Paik, M. C. The measurement of interrater agreement. Statistical methods for rates and proportions 2 (1981), 212--236.Google Scholar
- Gilbert, E. Phrases that signal workplace hierarchy. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM (2012), 1037--1046. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gwizdka, J. Reinventing the inbox: supporting the management of pending tasks in email. In CHI'02 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2002), 550--551. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hailpern, J., Jitkoff, N., Subida, J., and Karahalios, K. The clotho project: predicting application utility. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, ACM (2010), 330--339. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hart, S. G., and Staveland, L. E. Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of empirical and theoretical research. Human mental workload 1, 3 (1988), 139--183.Google Scholar
- Horvitz, E., Jacobs, A., and Hovel, D. Attention-sensitive alerting. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth conference on Uncertainty in artificial intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. (1999), 305--313. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Knott, A. A Data-Driven Methodology for Motivating a Set of Coherence Relations. PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh: College of Science and Engineering: The School of Informatics, July 1996.Google Scholar
- Landis, J. R., and Koch, G. G. The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. biometrics (1977), 159--174.Google Scholar
- Pierce, J. S., Bunde-Pedersen, J., and Ford, D. A. Triage and capture: Rethinking mobile email. interaction 5 (2010), 7.Google Scholar
- Renaud, K., Ramsay, J., and Hair, M. "you've got e-mail!"... shall i deal with it now? electronic mail from the recipient's perspective. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 21, 3 (2006), 313--332.Google Scholar
- Rohall, S. L., Gruen, D., Moody, P., Wattenberg, M., Stern, M., Kerr, B., Stachel, B., Dave, K., Armes, R., and Wilcox, E. Remail: a reinvented email prototype. In CHI'04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2004), 791--792. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Scerri, S., Handschuh, S., and Davis, B. The path towards semantic email: Summary and outlook. In Proceedings of EMAIL-08: the AAAI Workshop on Enhanced Messaging (2008).Google Scholar
- Tang, A., Siu, N., Lee, I., and Fels, S. Go with the flow: How users monitor incoming email. Tech. Rep. TR-2005-22, Dept. of Computer Science University of British Columbia, 2005.Google Scholar
- Thomas, G. F., King, C. L., Baroni, B., Cook, L., Keitelman, M., Miller, S., and Wardle, A. Reconceptualizing e-mail overload. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 20, 3 (2006), 252--287.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Wainer, J., Dabbish, L., and Kraut, R. Should i open this email?: inbox-level cues, curiosity and attention to email. In Proceedings of the CHI 2011, ACM (2011), 3439--3448. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whittaker, S., Matthews, T., Cerruti, J., Badenes, H., and Tang, J. Am i wasting my time organizing email?: a study of email refinding. In PART 5 - Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM (2011), 3449--3458. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whittaker, S., and Sidner, C. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI '96, ACM (1996), 276--283. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yiu, K. S., Baecker, R., Silver, N., and Long, B. A time-based interface for electronic mail and task management. ADVANCES IN HUMAN FACTORS ERGONOMICS 21 (1997), 19--22.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- MinEMail: SMS alert system for managing critical emails
Recommendations
Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "email overload" ten years later
CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative workTen years ago, Whittaker and Sidner [8] published research on email overload, coining a term that would drive a research area that continues today. We examine a sample of 600 mailboxes collected at a high-tech company to compare how users organize their ...
Scribee Experimentation - Early Statistics on Email Conversations
WI-IAT '11: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03Information overload is a real challenge becoming more and more critical regarding the quite limited human capabilities. 107 trillion emails sent in 2010, that is more than we could even imagine so how to help the user to take advantage from this? That ...
Using insights from email users to inform organisational email management policy
One would expect email substantially to increase organisational productivity and efficiency. There is little empirical evidence of this since email use is such a complex tool that it would be well nigh impossible to attribute efficiency increases solely ...
Comments