04/22/2020 – Bipasha Banerjee – Opportunities for Automating Email Processing: A Need-Finding Study

Summary

The primary goal of the paper is to provide automation support to users in terms of email handling. The authors first tried to determine what are the automatic features that users wanted in their email service and what are the informational and computational needs when it came to implementing such a system. They conducted three experiments, out of which, the first experiment was to gauge what kind of features the users wanted to be automated. In this particular study, there was no boundary as to what can or can’t be implemented. So this experiment effectively gave all the range of tasks and features users would “wish” their email interface provided. The second experiment aimed to find all the current automated implementations available on the market. This involved sifting through GitHub repositories to find projects aiming to solve the current gap regarding automation of email processing. Finally, the last experiment involved giving the users to code their “ideal” features using the YouPS interface. This study consisted mainly of students from engineering backgrounds familiar with Python programming.

Reflection

The paper provided an interesting perspective on how users want their email clients to perform. For this, it was important to understand the needs of the people. The authors’ do this by conducting the first experiment on finding the ideal features that users look for. I liked the way the task of customer discovery of needs was approached. However, I wanted to point out that the median age range of participants’ was 20-29, and all had a university affiliation. It would be interesting to see what older people from both university and industry background want in such email clients. Getting the perspective of a senior researcher or a senior manager is important. I feel that these people are the ones who receive far more number of emails and would want and need automated email processing. 

I resonated with most of the needs that users’ pointed out and recognized some of the existing features that my current email client provides. For example, google generally keeps an option of “follow up” if an email sent didn’t get a response or the “reply” option if the email received hasn’t been replied for n-days. I am particularly interested in the different modes that could be set up. This would prove to be useful where the user could focus on work and periodically check a particular label like “to-do” or “important.” Additionally, only getting an important notification is also a priceless feature, in my opinion. 

Having loved all the proposed features in this paper, I would also like to point out some of the flaws, in my opinion. First, some of the applied rules might cause disruptions in case of important emails. One of the features mentioned was to automatically mark an email “read” when the consecutive emails come from the same recipient. This would work in case of a “social” or “promotions” email. However, this might end up making the user do more tasks, i.e., find from the read emails the ones that he actually never read. Additionally, I was also curious to know how security was handled here. Emails are anyways not known to be a secure medium of communication, and using this tool on top of it might make it further unsecure. Especially when research-related topics are discussed in the emails, they might be prone to breach? 

Questions

1. What are the features you look for when it comes to email management? I would want to be only notified about emails that are important. 
2. What other systems could benefit from such studies other than email processing? Could this be used to improve recommender systems, other file organizing software? 
3. Would it be useful to take the input of senior researchers and managers? They are people who receive a lot of emails, and knowing their needs would be useful.
4. How was the security handled in the YouPS system?