Summary
In “Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories,” the authors Viegas, Golder, and Donath describe relationships between individuals over email. Themail, the interface created that shows these interactions and relationships, displays words pulled from emails. These words are categorized via a yearly or monthly basis; yearly words portray the overall tone of relationship, whereas monthly emails are more detailed. On the interface of the application, yearly words are displayed in the background in light gray, and monthly words are yellow in the foreground. When a specific word is selected, emails that contain the word appear. In order to test Themail, a study was provided such that participants could use one of two modes: the haystack mode or the needle mode. The haystack mode allowed users to view an overall picture of the relationships they had over email. Over the course of the study, a majority of the users (about 80%) decided to use the haystack mode because they wanted to see their relationships with their family and friends and confirm their expectations with their findings. On the other hand, the needle mode allowed users to view specific pieces of data to identify patterns in their relationships. The other 20% of the population were more concerned with analyzing their workplace relationships rather than those with their friends and family. The authors also discuss how most users would not utilize this application daily, rather, it is more probable that users use Themail every so often.
Reflection
Something I found interesting was the difference between the haystack and needle mode users. In the description of the the needle mode, the paper discusses that haystack users wanted to see information they already knew, but the needle users wanted to determine information they didn’t know or couldn’t remember. In particular, the authors note that about 20% of users used the needle mode, which made me curious if all the users only utilized Themail for one sole purpose (i.e. only haystack or only needle). Additionally, it was intriguing how the range of email archives ranged from 90 MB to more than 1GB with an average of 456 MB because I know that there extremes to people who email – some delete all their emails, and some don’t delete at all. For those who delete all their emails, Themail would obviously not be as applicable of an application. I actually don’t ever clean out or delete my emails, so I probably have a lot of data to sort through; however, I don’t think fruitful information pertaining my personal relationships would appear. This is especially because in this day and age most people don’t communicate solely over email. It would be interesting to apply this to texts.
Questions
- Though they would likely vary from person to person, which words were most popularly used?
- How could the UI change to make it less cluttered and perhaps easier to read?
- Is there a significance to placing the yearly words in the background rather than just displaying them on the side (or elsewhere in a different manner)?
