John C. Tang
Eric Wilcox
ABSTRACT
We describe the design of bluemail, a web-based email system that provides message tagging, message threading, and email folders. We wanted to explore how this combination of features would help users manage and organize their email. We conducted a limited field test of the prototype by observing how users triage their own email using bluemail. Our study identified ways in which users liked tagging, threading, and foldering capabilities, but also some of the complex ways in which they can interact. Our study elicited early user input to guide the iterative design of these features. It also involved a user study researcher, designer, and developer in the field test to quickly integrate different perspectives during development.
- Ames, Morgan, & Mor Naaman, "Why We Tag: Motivations for Annotation in Mobile and Online Media", Proc. CHI 2007, ACM Press (2007), pp. 971--980. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- del.icio.us, "del.icio.us/about", http://del.icio.us/about/, verified September 28, 2007.Google Scholar
- Ducheneaut, Nicolas & Victoria Bellotti, "E-mail as Habitat", Interactions, Sept. + Oct. (2001), pp. 30--38. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fisher, Danyel, A.J. Brush, Eric Gleave, and Marc A. Smith, "Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's 'Email overload' Ten Years Later", Proc. CSCW 2006, ACM Press (2006), pp. 309--312. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Flickr, "About Flickr", http://flickr.com/about/, verified September 28, 2007.Google Scholar
- GMail, "About GMail", http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html, verified September 21, 2007.Google Scholar
- Jones, William, Ammy J. Phuwanartnurak, Rajdeep Gill, and Harry Bruce, "Don't take my folders away! Organizing personal information to get things done", Extended Abstracts CHI 2005, (2005), pp. 1505--1508. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Karat, Clare-Marie, Robert Campbell, and Tarra Fiegel, "Comparison of empirical testing and walkthrough methods in user interface evaluation", Proc. CHI 1992, ACM Press (1992), pp. 397--404. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lewis, David D. & Kimberly A. Knowles, "Threading electronic mail: A preliminary study", Information Processing and Management: An International Journal, Vol. 33, Iss. 2, (March 1997), pp. 209--217. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mackay, Wendy, "Diversity in the use of electronic mail: A preliminary inquiry", ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1988), pp. 380--397. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Millen, David R., Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, "Dogear: Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise", Proc. CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), pp. 111--120. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nusser, Stefan, Julian Cerruti, Eric Wilcox, Steve Cousins, Jerald Schoudt, Sergio Sancho, "Enabling Efficient Orienteering Behavior in Webmail Clients", Proc. UIST 2007, ACM Press (2007). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Resnick, Paul, "RFC 2822 (rfc2822)", http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html, verified September 25, 2007.Google Scholar
- Rivadeneira, A.W., Daniel M. Gruen, Michael J. Muller, David R. Millen, "Getting Our Head in the Clouds: Toward Evaluation Studies of Tagclouds", Proc. CHI 2007, ACM Press (2007), pp. 995--998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wattenberg, Martin, Steven L. Rohall, Daniel Gruen, and Bernard Kerr, "E-Mail Research: Targeting the Enterprise", Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 20, Nos. 1 & 2 (2005), pp. 139--162. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wilcox, Eric, Stefan Nusser, Jerald Schoudt, Julian Cerruti, Hernan Badenes, "Agile development meets strategic design in the enterprise", Proc. Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming XP 2007, Spring (2007), pp. 208--212. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whittaker, Steve & Candace Sidner, "Email overload: Exploring personal information management of email", Proc. CHI 1996, ACM Press (1996), pp. 276--283. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zawinsky, Jamie, "Message Threading", http://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html, verified September 25, 2007.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Tag-it, snag-it, or bag-it: combining tags, threads, and folders in e-mail
Recommendations
Am I wasting my time organizing email?: a study of email refinding
CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsWe all spend time every day looking for information in our email, yet we know little about this refinding process. Some users expend considerable preparatory effort creating complex folder structures to promote effective refinding. However modern email ...
Best of both worlds: improving gmail labels with the affordances of folders
CHI EA '10: CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsGmail's filing system for email conversations is based around labels, which are more flexible and powerful than folders. With its original user interface, many users did not discover labels, and wondered why Gmail had no folders. The Gmail team ...
Threading centric approach towards email client
OzCHI '13: Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, CollaborationEmail has changed from its original vision of a simple asynchronous communication system to a core application for digital personal information management. In its current form, Email lets you glance at all of your information at once. Mechanisms ...
Comments