You scratch my back and i'll scratch yours: combating email overload collaboratively

ABSTRACT

Email is no longer perceived as a communication marvel, but rather as a constant source of information overload. Several studies have shown that accessing, managing, and archiving email threatens to affect users' productivity. While several strategies and tools have been proposed to assuage this burden, none have attempted to empower users to fight the overload collaboratively. We hypothesize that despite differences in email management practices and frequencies of filing among users, there is some degree of similarity in the end-product of the organizational structures reached by those working in close cooperative roles (e.g. members of a research group, employees of an organization). In this paper, we describe a system that enables collaborators to share their filing strategies among themselves. Tags applied by one user are suggested to other recipients of the same email, thereby amortizing the cost of tagging and email management across all stakeholders. We wish to examine if such system support for semi-automated tagging reduces email overload for all users, and whether it leads to overall time savings for an entire enterprise as network effects propagate over time.

REFERENCES

• 1: Olle Bälter , Candace L Sidner, Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox, Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, October 19-23, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark [doi>10.1145/572020.572034]
• 2: Richard Boardman , M. Angela Sasse, "Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out": a cross-tool study of personal information management, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.583-590, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985766]
• 3: S. Bradshaw, M. Light, and D. Eichmann. (Bee)Dancing on the Boundary between PIM and GIM. In Proceedings of the 2nd Invitational Workshop on Personal Information Management at SIGIR 2006., 2006.
• 4: Thomas Erickson, From PIM to GIM: personal information management in group contexts, Communications of the ACM, v.49 n.1, January 2006 [doi>10.1145/1107458.1107495]
• 5: D. Fisher, A. Brush, B. Hogan, M. Smith, and A. Jacobs. Using social metadata in email triage: Lessons from the field. Human Interface and the Management of Information. Interacting in Information Environments, pages 13--22, 2007.
• 6: Anurag Garg , Roberto Battiti , Roberto G. Cascella, "May I borrow Your Filter?" Exchanging Filters to Combat Spam in a Community, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications, p.489-493, April 18-20, 2006 [doi>10.1109/AINA.2006.1]
• 7: Jacek Gwizdka, Email task management styles: the cleaners and the keepers, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985921.986032]
• 8: William Jones , Predrag Klasnja , Andrea Civan , Michael L. Adcock, The personal project planner: planning to organize personal information, Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1357054.1357162]
• 9: Victor Kaptelinin, UMEA: translating interaction histories into project contexts, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642673]
• 10: Diane Kelly, Evaluating personal information management behaviors and tools, Communications of the ACM, v.49 n.1, January 2006 [doi>10.1145/1107458.1107497]
• 11: Wendy E. Mackay, More than just a communication system: diversity in the use of electronic mail, Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.344-353, September 26-28, 1988, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/62266.62293]
• 12: D. Maier, A. Halevy, M. Bates, H. Bruce, B. Bederson, and M. Knox. Enhancements of personal information. In Breakout Group Summary, PIM Workshop 2005, 2005.
• 13: Thomas W. Malone, How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.1 n.1, p.99-112, Jan. 1983 [doi>10.1145/357423.357430]
• 14: Meredith Ringel Morris , Eric Horvitz, SearchTogether: an interface for collaborative web search, Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 07-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA [doi>10.1145/1294211.1294215]
• 15: John C. Tang , Clemens Drews , Mark Smith , Fei Wu , Alison Sue , Tessa Lau, Exploring patterns of social commonality among file directories at work, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1240624.1240769]
• 16: Steve Whittaker , Candace Sidner, Email overload: exploring personal information management of email, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.276-283, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238530]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
collaborative tagging, email management, personal information management