Reinventing the Inbox – Supporting the Management of Pending Tasks in Email Jacek Gwizdka Interactive Media Laboratory, Knowledge Media Design Institute University of Toronto 5 King’s College Rd., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G8
[email protected] ABSTRACT
Email was originally designed as a tool for asynchronous communication. However, its current usage goes far beyond that. One of the most commonly performed activities in email is the management of pending tasks. This research focuses on how to support this activity in email and explores alternative solutions that use different external representations of messages and associated tasks. Keywords
Email user interface, task management, prospective memory, external representations, visualization. INTRODUCTION & MOTIVATION
We are witnessing a dramatic growth of email, both in terms of the number of mailboxes and in terms of the number of messages. At the end of 2000 there were 891.1 million email accounts worldwide, 67% more than in 1999 [8]. In 1998 an estimated 3 billion messages were sent every day in the USA. There is also an increasing variety of information types carried by emails. As a result people spend a lot of time in email programs, which become their primary “electronic habitat” [2]. A habitat used not only for asynchronous communication, but also for a range of unforeseen email tasks, such as scheduling, management of to-dos, reminders, and contacts. Email is also for documenting activities, and file transfer [10], [2]. Previous research
A number of email systems have focused on message categorization. While email classification is important, there was often no clear sense what user task was being supported. Other systems have focused on supporting the “original” email task - asynchronous communication, for example, by combining visualization of conversational threads with timelines [7] or by providing relevant context for reading and composing messages. There have been innovations at the user interface, such as the placement of messages employing a pile metaphor to support tracking of tasks in email [1]. There are relatively few attempts to support a wider range of tasks in email. Two general approaches to such support are possible: 1) make it easy for information to be Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2002, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. ACM 1-58113-454-1/02/0004.
transferred from email to other media, where the tasks are typically performed; 2) add support for the “new” tasks within email programs. I pursue the latter approach. To initially explore the problem, I conducted two preliminary studies of email and personal information management tool use [4], [5]. I found that people often use email as a time and task management tool (confirming the previous studies [10]). Inboxes are often used to keep those messages referring to the future that cannot be dealt with upon their arrival. These messages are used as reminders about both email tasks and non-email tasks and events. Information from these messages is not transferred out of email, presumably because of the high cost of doing so. This high cost is often due to the lack of integration of email with other software applications or media. Thus this research focuses on supporting the management of pending tasks in email. The term pending task is used here to denote any activity that is to be performed in the future, such as attending a meeting, visiting a friend, writing a paper, or replying to an email. RESEARCH BACKGROUND
How should the management of pending tasks in email programs be supported? Theories and models of prospective memory, which aim to explain processes involved in remembering to remember to do something in the future (e.g. encoding, monitoring, reminding), are particularly relevant. Associated areas of study include distributed cognition, (where the external environment is seen as playing an integral role in cognition and task performance), external representations of information, (which can have a critical impact on how that information will be used in a task [3], [12]), and studies in temporal and spatial reasoning (showing that people use spatially coded mental models in reasoning about temporal relations [9]). Specific user interfaces to future email should also provide suitable affordances and visualizations that utilize properties of visual perception. Understanding the role of both external artifacts in managing multiple pending tasks, and internal processes and how they can be externalized, is central to my research. It has been argued that office desks are organized to remind about tasks [6]. Spatial arrangement is used to represent activities, their priorities, temporal dependencies and relationships among multiple tasks. Management of
everyday activities relies heavily on such spatial placement and manipulation of physical objects [3]. DESIGN SPACE
To explore management of pending tasks in email the design space may be divided into two levels of external representations. 1) Intra-item level – the message level. Visual representation of pending tasks embodied by email messages. How should each task be represented? What task attributes should be presented and how? 2) Inter-item level – the inbox level. Spatial arrangements of pending tasks. How should different spatial configurations support management of pending tasks? Is manual manipulation of spatial arrangement better than automatic arrangement? Is 2D better than 1D? CURRENT AND FUTURE STUDIES
I am exploring two prototype email user interfaces and carrying out user studies to evaluate and compare them. First, I explore automatic placement of pending tasks described, or implied, by email messages.. A 2D interface will be used to display temporal information along with the priorities of pending tasks. Tasks are represented by dots on a 2D plane with task attributes, time and subject, shown on the x-axis and y-axis, respectively (Figure 1). The interface is based on TimeStore [11]. The user study will involve comparing three interfaces: the “traditional” inbox, an electronic calendar, and the email task view. The study will simulate real-life email handling by employing scenarios and a corpus of messages. It will consist of three session conducted over a period of two weeks. Participants will read messages, look up pending task information and recall this information from memory. I hypothesize that the proposed 2D email interface will improve short- and longterm task information recall from memory, as well as efficiency (e.g. time) of finding task information.
SIGNIFICANCE
Expected contributions of my research: 1) Research results concerning use of computer mediated external artifacts to manage pending tasks; 2) Establishing evaluation measures for task awareness in email; 3) Design and evaluation of alternative email interfaces. CONCLUSIONS
Pending tasks are handled poorly in current email systems. Research is needed to examine how explicit presentation of task information at the user interface can improve awareness of pending tasks that are encoded within email messages. The physical environment, in which people perform everyday activities, is very flexible. I expect that bringing some of this flexibility into the email environment, will better support a variety of tasks performed in email. It remains to be seen how well the type of solutions considered here can address the daunting task of gaining control over electronic mail. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research has been funded by scholarships from NSERC, OGS, and by grants from CITO and BUL. One of the preliminary studies [5] was conducted at Xerox PARC in collaboration with Michelle Baldonado. Thanks to Prof. Mark Chignell, my thesis supervisor, for his continued support and to Prof. Ron Baecker for making TimeStore code available for my research. REFERENCES 1. Bälter, O. & Sidner, C. (2000). Bifrost Inbox Organizer: Giving users control over the inbox, Lotus Research TR 00-08. 2. Ducheneaut, N., Bellotti, V. (2001). Email as habitat: an exploration of embedded PIM. Interactions, 8(5), ACM Press. 30-38. 3. Gruen, D. (1996). The Role of External Resources in the Management of Multiple Activities. PhD Thesis. UCSD: San Diego, CA, USA. 4. Gwizdka, J. (2000). Timely Reminders: A Case Study of Temporal Guidance in PIM and Email Tools Usage. Proceedings of CHI'2000. ACM Press. 163-164 5. Gwizdka, J. (2001). Supporting Prospective Information in Email. Proceedings of CHI'2001. ACM Press. 135-136. 6. Malone, T. (1983). How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of office information systems. ACM TOIS. 1, 99–112. 7. Rohall, S.L., et al. (2001). Information Visualization, Electronic Mail, Threads, Trees. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis) 2001, October 22-23, 2001, San Diego, CA. 8. United Messaging. (2001). 2000 Year End Mailbox Report. http://www.unitedmessaging.com/form.cfm?ID=BA6NA8&CID=13
Figure 1. Email task view (based on TimeStore[11]) Second, I will explore manual arrangement of pending task information. My user studies will incorporate tests of cognitive abilities (such as spatial and working memory), organizational role and personality traits (e.g. conscientiousness) as independent variables, and will examine their effects on participant performance, and on subjective preferences for email interfaces.
9. Vandierendonck, A. & De Vooght, G. (1998). Mental models and working memory in temporal reasoning and spatial reasoning. In V. De Keyser, et al. (eds.). Time and the dynamic control of behavior. Göttingen: Hogrefe & Huber. 383-402 10.Whittaker, S., Sidner, C. (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. Proceedings of CHI 96. ACM Press. 276-283. 11.Yiu, K., Baecker, R.M., Silver, N., and Long, B. (1997). A Timebased Interface for Electronic Mail and Task Management. In Proceedings of HCI International '97. Vol. 2, Elsevier. 19-22. 12.Zhang, J.& Norman, D. A. (1994). Representations in distributed cognitive tasks. Cognitive Science, 18, 87-122.
