Paper: Soya Park, Amy X. Zhang, Luke S. Murray, and David R. Karger. 2019. Opportunities for Automating Email Processing: A Need-Finding Study. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’19), 1–12
Summary: This paper is a need-finding study exploring the opportunities and challenges for automating email processing. The authors conducted a mixed-methods study to pinpoint users’ expectations and needs in terms of automating email handling, in addition to the informational and computational support required for it. This study was divided into three main parts: what types of automated emails users want, what types of information and computation is needed, and then a field deployment of a simple inbox scripting tool. They did so in two steps. First, they had a formative design workshop where 13 computer science students created email processing rules. Second, they had a survey where 77 people (as well as 35 people without a technical background) answered questions to better understand categories of email automation, and their needs. The results show that there is a need to strengthen richer data on email, better management features, use of internal and external context,, and affordances. Finally, the paper describes a platform for writing small scripts for users’ inboxes, called YouPS. They enlisted 12 email users and found that users wanted more automation in their email management, especially in terms of richer data models, and processing content automatically.
Reflection: I agree with the premise of the paper: the fact that we should and can help people better manage their email inboxes to reduce the amount of energy people spend making sense of it. I wonder why email itself has got so overwhelming in the first place, and how it has affected workplace productivity.
I especially like the multi-pronged approach that the authors took in this paper, with a formative study, a survey, and building a system. I believe this multi-state approach is valuable and can provide multiple insights as well as opportunities for triangulating data.
With respect to their findings, I think the need for richer data models and rules, as well as ways to leverage internal and external email contexts are very important. If we are able to understand, for example, the senders’ urgency level and the receivers’ commitments to that sender, then we could draft a rule prioritizing or deprioritizing said emails. I also think the use of email templates and autofill options are useful and Google does something but in a more intelligent way with Gmail’s autofill feature.
However, I wonder how many users actually make use of intelligent filters, and/or would make use of any new tools that are introduced in the feature. It may be the case that only knowledge workers are bombarded with emails that require responses, while most other users simply receive spam (which, I think, is about 90-95% of emails that are sent in the entire world). It would also be interesting to see how this differs between people’s work and home emails. I myself maintain an email address for communications that I know will be spammy, such as insurance applications.
Questions:
- How do you manage your email? Do you use filters?
- Do you manage your different inboxes differently? How?
- What do you think of YouPS? Would you use it? Why or why not?
