TaskView: Design and Evaluation of a Task-Based Email Interface

Gwizdka, Jacek TaskView: Design and Evaluation of a Task-Based Email Interface., 2002 . In 2002 Conference of the IBM Centre of Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research (CASCON), Markham, Ontario, Canada, September 30 - October 3, 2002. [Conference paper]

[thumbnail of GwizdkaJ-2002-CASCON-Conf.pdf]
Preview
 PDF
GwizdkaJ-2002-CASCON-Conf.pdf
Download (820kB) | Preview

English abstract

Email was originally designed as a tool for asynchronous communication. However, as the number of messages increased, so did their variety. A wide range of new and unforeseen email tasks reflects this variety. One of the most commonly performed activities in email is management of pending tasks. This research focuses on how to support this activity in email and explores solutions that use different external representations of messages and associated tasks. Central to this research is understanding the role of both external artifacts in managing multiple pending tasks, as well as internal representations and processes and how they can be linked to external representations. In a recent study we compared the effects of two email interfaces (Microsoft Outlook Inbox and TimeStore-TaskView) on efficiency and effectiveness of information finding in email messages. We found that TimeStore-TaskView interface was overall faster for finding information related to task dates, time and task overviews, while the Inbox interface was faster for finding information from subject lines, senders or from the message body. Based on the results from the study, we are in the process of designing a modified email prototype and a follow-up user study.

Item type: Conference paper
Keywords: email interface, task management, prospective memory, external representations, visualization
Subjects: L. Information technology and library technology > LA. Telecommunications.
L. Information technology and library technology > LK. Software methodologies and engineering.
Depositing user: Jacek Gwizdka
Date deposited: 25 Nov 2009
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:15
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/13700

References

Bälter, O. & Sidner, C. (2000). Bifrost Inbox Organizer: Giving users control over the inbox, Lotus Research TR 00-08.

Benet-Martinez, V. & John, O. P. (1998) Los Cincos Grandes across cultures and ethnic groups: Multitrait multimethod analyses of the Big Five in Spanish and English. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 729-750.

Cadiz, JJ., Dabbish, L., Gupta, A. & Venolia, G.D. (2001). Supporting Email Workflow. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2001-88. September 2001.

Ducheneaut, N., Bellotti, V. (2001). Email as habitat: an exploration of embedded PIM. Interactions, 8(5), ACM Press. 30-38.

Ekstrom R.B. et al. (1976). Manual for Kit of Factor-Referenced Cognitive Tests 1976. Education Testing Service: Princeton, NJ, USA.

Gruen, D. (1996). The Role of External Resources in the Management of Multiple Activities. PhD Thesis. UCSD: San Diego, CA, USA.

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

Gwizdka, J. (2001). Supporting Prospective Information in Email. Proceedings of CHI'2001. ACM Press. 135-136.

Gwizdka, J. (2001). Reinventing the Inbox: Supporting Prospective Information in Email. CASCON 2001. Poster.

Gwizdka, J. (2002). Reinventing the Inbox: Supporting Prospective Information in Email. Proceedings of CHI'2002. ACM Press. pp.

Jovicic, A. (2000). Implications for the design of email management software. M.Sc. Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto.

Kiritchenko, S. & Matwin, S. (2001). Email Classification with Co-Training. CASCON 2001.

Malone, T. (1983). How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of office information systems. ACM TOIS. 1, 99–112.

Mock, K. (2001). An Experimental Framework for Email Categorization and Management. SIGIR 2001. ACM Press.

Murphy K.R., Myors B. (1998). Statistical Power Analysis. A Simple and General Model for Traditional and Model Hypothesis Tests. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers: Mahwah, NJ, USA.

Robertson, G., et al. (1998). Data mountain: using spatial memory for document management. UIST 1998 ACP Press. 153–162.

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.

Scaife M., Rogers, Y. (1996). External cognition: How do graphical representations work? International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 45, 185-213.

Tam, J., Bodner, R. and Chignell, M.H. "A Demonstration on How Dynamic Hypertext Can Improve Performance", Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Albuquerque, New Mexico, September, 1997.

United Messaging. (2001). 2000 Year End Mailbox Report. http://www.unitedmessaging.com/form.cfm?ID=BA6NA8&CID=13

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

Whittaker, S., Sidner, C. (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. Proceedings of CHI 96. ACM Press. 276-283.

Whittaker, S., Jones, Q., and Terveen, L. (to appear). Managing Long Term Conversations: Conversation and Contact Management. In HICCS 2002

Yiu, K., Baecker, R.M., Silver, N., and Long, B. (1997). A Time-based Interface for Electronic Mail and Task Management. In Proceedings of HCI International '97. Vol. 2, Elsevier. 19-22.

Zhang, J.& Norman, D. A. (1994). Representations in distributed cognitive tasks. Cognitive Science, 18, 87-122.

Zhang, J (1996). A representational analysis of relational information displays. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 45, 59-7


Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item
Contact us
Send email Sponsors
Sponsor: AIMS Sponsor: D&P Sponsor: UniNa CAB Get connected
Facebook Facebook Twitter Twitter Linkedin LinkedIn RSS RSS