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Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "email overload" ten years later
Abstract and Figures
Ten years ago, Whittaker and Sidner (8) published research on email overload, coining a term that would drive a research area that continues today. We examine a sample of 600 mailboxes collected at a high-tech company to compare how users organize their email now to 1996. While inboxes are roughly the same size as in 1996, our population's email archives have grown tenfold. We see little evidence of distinct strategies for handling email; most of our users fall into a middle ground. There remains a need for future innovations to help people manage growing archives of email and large inboxes.
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... Their study also found that people found it a challenge to deal with email and revealed several strategies they used. Later studies by Fisher et al. [16] and Grevet et al. [20] replicated, updated, and extended Whittaker and SidnerâĂŹs findings. ...
Bulk email is a primary communication channel within organizations, with all-company messages and regular newsletters serving as a mechanism for making employees aware of policies, events, and other needed messages. Ineffective communication could result in substantial wasted employee time and lack of awareness or compliance. Previous studies on organizational emails focused mostly on recipients. However, organizational bulk email systems are a multi-stakeholder problem including recipients, communicators, and organization itself. Thus we study the effectiveness, experience, practice, and assessments of organizational bulk email systems from different stakeholders' perspectives. We conducted a quantitative study within a large organization to understand the extent to which the recipients retained the messages from the organizational bulk emails they received. We conducted a qualitative study with communicators and recipients within the organization. We delved into the bulk email distributing mechanisms of the communicators, the reading behaviors of recipients, and the bulk emails' values from communicators and recipients' points of view. We found that the recipients were not retaining most of the messages from the bulk emails though they opened a large number of them. The tools for designing and distributing organizational bulk email for communicators were very limited. The assessments on bulk emails' values and effectiveness were different between communicators and recipients. We discussed possible solutions that could improve organizational bulk emails' designing and distributing mechanisms.
... The fist research on Email Overload was done by Whittaker & Sidner in 1996, who also coined the term. It is a highly cited piece of research (1,753 references to it, according to Google Scholar) and since then, Whittaker and others have extended this research (e.g.: Dabbish & Kraut, 2006;Fisher et al, 2006;Whittaker et al, 2005;Barley et al, 2011;Grevet et al, 2014). ...
How might we improve the experience of users with commercial email subscriptions in a post-GDPR environment?
This paper presents the results of a study designed to identify the cues employees use to identify an email as important and/or urgent. Taking an emic perspective, a qualitative research methodology is used to analyze interview responses from knowledge workers. Our findings support the notion that employees use strategies similar to those encapsulated in Mitchell et al.’s (1997) operationalization of stakeholder salience when evaluating an email's importance and/or urgency. Results from this study can be used to design email policies to support knowledge worker performance. Cet article présente les résultats d'une étude visant à identifier les indices utilisés par les employés pour identifier un courriel comme important et/ou urgent. Dans une perspective émique, une méthodologie de recherche qualitative est utilisée pour analyser les réponses obtenues en entrevue avec des travailleurs du savoir. Nos résultats appuient l'idée que les employés utilisent des stratégies semblables à celles décrites dans l'opérationnalisation de la saillance des parties prenantes entreprise par Mitchell et al. (1997) lors de l'évaluation de l'importance et/ou de l'urgence d'un courriel. Les résultats de cette étude pourront servir à concevoir des politiques de messagerie ciblant l'amélioration du rendement des travailleurs du savoir.
E-mail is that the most typical method of communication because of its ability to get, the rapid modification of messages and low cost of distribution. E-mail is one among the foremost secure medium for online communication and transferring data or messages through the net. An overgrowing increase in popularity, the quantity of unsolicited data has also increased rapidly. Spam causes traffic issues and bottlenecks that limit the quantity of memory and bandwidth, power and computing speed. To filtering data, different approaches exist which automatically detect and take away these untenable messages. There are several numbers of email spam filtering technique like Knowledge-based technique, Clustering techniques, Learning-based technique, Heuristic processes so on. For data filtering, various approaches exist that automatically detect and suppress these indefensible messages. This paper illustrates a survey of various existing email spam filtering system regarding Machine Learning Technique (MLT) like Naive Bayes, SVM, K-Nearest Neighbor, Bayes Additive Regression, KNN Tree, and rules. Henceforth here we give the classification, evaluation and comparison of some email spam filtering system and summarize the scenario regarding accuracy rate of various existing approaches. Keywords: e-mail spam, unsolicited bulk email, spam filtering methods.
Karasek's (1979) demand-control (JDC) model of stress was used to theoretically justify the following hypothesis regarding the relationship between employee email use and well-being: (1) the demands imposed on an employee by their use of email (i.e., email volume, hours spent per week in email, the perceived importance and importance/urgency of the email they send/receive) will predict their perceptions of email overload, (2) perceptions of email overload will predict employee well-being, and (3) work control will moderate the relationships between email demands and email overload. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to test the paths in the model using a sample of 1491 knowledge workers. Our analysis confirmed that all four conceptualizations of email demands included in our model predicted email overload and that email overload was a significant predictor of perceived stress. Control over work moderated the path between ‘Important and Urgent’ email and email overload, providing partial support for Karasek's buffer hypothesis. This study contributes to the well-being literature by demonstrating that: (1) email overload is a distinct type of role overload, and (2) email-related strain can be mitigated by giving employees more control over their work.
Purpose
This study examines users' information selection strategy on knowledge-sharing platforms from the individual level, peer level and societal level. Though previous literature has explained these three levels separately, few have simultaneously examined their impacts and identified the dominant one according to their effect strengths. The study aims to fill this research gap of the competitions among different levels of information selection mechanisms. Besides, this study also proposes a three-step decision-tree approach to depict the consumption process, including the decision of first-time exposure, the decision of continuous consumption and the decision of feedback behavior participation.
Design/methodology/approach
This study analyzed a clickstream dataset of a Chinese information technology blogging site, CSDN.net. Employing a sequential logit model, it examined the impacts of self-level interest similarity, peer-level interest similarity and global popularity simultaneously on each turning point in the consumption process.
Findings
The authors’ findings indicate that self-level interest similarity is the most dominant factor influencing users to browse a knowledge-sharing blog, followed by peer-level interest similarity and then global popularity. All three mechanisms have consistent influences on decision-making in continuous information consumption. Surprisingly, the authors find self-level interest similarity negatively influences users to give feedback on knowledge-sharing blogs.
Originality/value
This paper fulfills the research gap of the dominance among three-levels of selection mechanisms. This study's findings not only could contribute to information consumption studies by providing theoretical insights on audience behavior patterns, but also help the industry advance its recommendation algorithm design and improve users' experience satisfaction.
Peer review – The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-10-2020-0475
Bulk email is a primary communication channel within organizations, with all-company emails and regular newsletters serving as a mechanism for making employees aware of policies and events. Ineffective communication could result in wasted employee time and a lack of compliance or awareness. Previous studies on organizational emails focused mostly on recipients. However, organizational bulk email system is a multi-stakeholder problem including recipients, communicators, and the organization itself.
We studied the effectiveness, practice, and assessments of the organizational bulk email system of a large university from multi-stakeholders' perspectives. We conducted a qualitative study with the university's communicators, recipients, and managers. We delved into the organizational bulk email's distributing mechanisms of the communicators, the reading behaviors of recipients, and the perspectives on emails' values of communicators, managers, and recipients.
We found that the organizational bulk email system as a whole was strained, and communicators are caught in the middle of this multi-stakeholder problem. First, though the communicators had an interest in preserving the effectiveness of channels in reaching employees, they had high-level clients whose interests might outweigh judgment about whether a message deserves widespread circulation. Second, though communicators thought they were sending important information, recipients viewed most of the organizational bulk emails as not relevant to them. Third, this disagreement was amplified by the success metric used by communicators. They viewed their bulk emails as successful if they had a high open rate. But recipients often opened and then rapidly discarded emails without reading the details. Last, while the communicators in general understood the challenge, they had a limited set of targeting and feedback tools to support their task.
Purpose
The objective of this paper is to document and analyze the organizational activities of faculty members using a personal information management (PIM) framework developed by Jacques (2016).
Design/methodology/approach
Interviews were carried out with seven faculty members, focusing on their personal information organization practices as they relate to their academic activities. These interviews took the form of a guided tour of informants' digital workspaces.
Findings
Analyses focused on PIM activities make it possible to identify the different strategies adopted by faculty members to organize their academic personal information. This qualitative approach highlights four activities involved in the organization of personal information: inclusion, exclusion, apprehension and implementation. It also reveals differences in the ability of faculty members to analyze their own practices. Finally, the relationship to time and memory of PIM practices is examined through the lens of the concepts of virtualization and actualization.
Originality/value
This research provides a more nuanced understanding of PIM practices, specifically of organizational activities, by considering the meaning of these practices for individuals as part of their daily lives. It aims to foster literacy by facilitating the interactions of individuals with their personal information through educational activities.
Working in an environment with constant interruptions is known to affect stress, but how do interruptions affect emotional expression? Emotional expression can have significant impact on interactions among coworkers. We analyzed the video of 26 participants who performed an essay task in a laboratory while receiving either continual email interruptions or receiving a single batch of email. Facial videos of the participants were run through a convolutional neural network to determine the emotional mix via decoding of facial expressions. Using a novel co-occurrence matrix analysis, we showed that with batched email, a neutral emotional state is dominant with sadness being a distant second, and with continual interruptions, this pattern is reversed, and sadness is mixed with fear. We discuss the implications of these results for how interruptions can impact employees' well-being and organizational climate.
Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. This process can quickly become a serious problem for users with large volumes of email. Studies have found that people use a variety of approaches to triage their email, many of which have a social component. We believe that email clients can better support email triage by providing users with additional sorting features based on socially salient information. We present a prototype email client, SNARF (the Social Network and Relationship Finder), that aggregates social meta-data about email correspondents to aid email triage. Users can then sort their correspondents based on this meta-data, bringing emails from socially important people to the foreground.
Email is one oftl~ most successful computer applicmiom yet devised. Our empin~:al ct~ta show however, that althongh email was origiraUy designed as a c~nmunica/ons application, it is now used for ~tional funaions, that it was not designed for, such as tab management and persona/ afoOt/v/rig. We call this ernt~l oveHoad We demonstrate that email overload creates problems for personal information manageaa,cnt: users eden have cluttered inboxes cor~mining hundreds of n~:age~¢, incl~rling outstanding tasks, partially read documents and conversational threads. Furthermore,, user attemt:Xs to rationalise their inbox~ by ~ing are ~Ron unsuccessful, with the consequence that important rr~ges get overlooked, or "lost" in archives. We explain how em~l over/oad/ng arises and propose technical solutions to the problem.
Email has come to play a central role in task management, yet email tool features have remained relatively static in recent years, lagging behind users? evolving practices. The Taskmaster system narrows this gap by recasting email as task management and embedding task-centric resources directly in the client. In this paper, we describe the field research that inspired Taskmaster and the principles behind its design. We then describe how user studies conducted with ?live? email data over a two-week period revealed the value of a task-centric approach to email system design and its potential benefits for overloaded users.
Everyday work frequently involves coordinating and collaborating with others, but the structure of collaboration is largely invisible to conventional desktop applications. We are exploring ways to support everyday collaboration by allowing applications access to the social, organizational, and temporal settings within which work is conducted. In this paper, we present two generations of systems supporting everyday collaboration, focusing on ways to recover and represent the temporal and social structures of online activity.
Electronic mail has become the most widely-used application for business productivity and communication, yet many people are frustrated with their email. Though email usage has changed, our email clients largely have not. In this paper, we describe a prototype email client developed out of a multi-year iterative design process aimed at providing those who "live in their email" with an improved, integrated email experience. We highlight innovative features and describe the user trials for each version of the prototype with resulting modifications. Finally, we discuss how these studies have recast our understanding of the email "habitat" and user needs.
We present in this paper a procedure to automatically discover a user s personal topics by clustering their emails. Unlike previous work, we automatically label topics using appropriate keywords. We show that, in order to get appropriate keywords, we must apply strong filters that use domain knowledge about e-mail and the workplace of the user. We demonstrate these keywords by creating an email/ document browser which makes use of these keywords as standing queries to create virtual folders that help organize, index and retrieve email efficiently. We present subjective user studies to show the usefulness of the strong filtering.
While most mail reader applications allow users to file messages into folders, in practice this task tends to be tedious. For each message, the user must first decide which folder is most appropriate. Then, the user must inform the mail reader of that choice by selecting the appropriate icon or menu item from among what is typically a set of several dozen choices. The combined effort of choosing a folder and conveying that choice to the application often discourages users from filing their mail, resulting in unmanageable inboxes that contain hundreds or even thousands of unfiled messages. MailCat encourages users to file their mail by simplifying the task. Using an adaptive classifier, it predicts the three folders that are most likely to be appropriate for a given message, and provides shortcut buttons that permit the user to file it into a predicted folder effortlessly. For typical users, MailCat's predictions are accurate over 80% to 90% of the time, resulting in a substantial reduc...
As more people use e-mail at home or on the job, more people have come to experience the pain of e-mail that Denning first wrote about 20 years ago [3]. In this paper, we present data from a field study in our own company to add to the existing body of research about how people use e-mail. We then use these data and prior literature to outline a framework of the five main activities that we believe people use e-mail for. In particular, we focus on two activities that we believe have been under-studied: attending to the flow of messages they arrive, and doing “triage” on a body of new messages. In addition, we outline potential design directions for improving the e-mail experience, with a focus on e-mail clients that group messages and their replies together into threads. We present a prototype of such an interface as well as results from a lab study of the prototype.