Summary:
“Opportunities for Automating Email Processing: A Need-Finding Study” by Park et. al. is an interesting paper as it talks about the need to manage emails. Managing emails is a time-consuming task that takes significant effort both from the consumer and the recipient. The authors find out that some of the work can be automated. The authors performed a mixed-methods need-finding study in order to essentially understand and answer two important questions: (i) What kind of automatic email handling do users want? (ii) What kind of information and computation is needed to support that automation? The authors conduct an investigation including a design workshop and a survey to identify the categories of needs and thoroughly understand these needs. The authors also surveyed the existing automated email classification systems to understand which needs have been addressed and where the gaps are in fulfilling these needs. The work done highlights the need for: “(i) a richer data model for rules, (ii) more ways to manage attention, (iii) leveraging internal and external email context, (iv) complex processing such as response aggregation, and affordances for senders.” The authors also ran a small authorized script over a user’s inbox which demonstrated that the above needs can not be fulfilled by existing email clients. This can be used as a motivation for new design interventions in email clients.
Reflections:
This is an interesting work that has the potential to pave the way for new design interventions in email processing and email management. However, there are certain limitations of this work. Out of the three studies that the authors conducted, two of them were explicitly focused on programmers. The third study focused on an engineer. This brings into question the generalizability of the experiments conducted. The needs of diverse users may wary and the results might not hold. Also, the questions the authors asked in the survey were influenced by the design workshop conducted by the authors which in turn influenced the analysis of the needs. The results might not hold true for all kinds of participants. The authors also could not quantify the percentage of need that is not being met. Also, asking programmers to be a part of the study did not help as they have the skills to write their own code and fulfill their own needs. The GUI needed by non-programmers might differ from those needed by the programmers. The authors should also seek insight from prior tools to build and improve upon their system.
Questions:
1. What are your thoughts on the paper? How do you plan to use the concepts present in the paper in your project?
2. Would you want an email client that manages your attention? Do you think that would be helpful?
3. How difficult is it for machine learning models to understand the internal and external context of an email?
4. Which email client do you use? What are the limitations of that email client?
5. Do you think writing simple rules for email management is too simplistic?
This paper is essentially a need-finding exercise, which is like the first step in the UX design process. Had the scope of the class project been longer, I would certainly have done a need-finding survey to understand the problems with existing online discussion platforms (i.e. my class project).
About writing rules for email management, even though it’s simple, I believe it’s incredibly useful. Over time, I have used tons of filters in my gmail inbox. And I have wished on many occasions to provide even a bit more flexibility. I think the paper actually make the point about simple solutions already existing, but somehow they get overlooked or are re-purposed.