Attending to Email

Abstract

Email has become deeply embedded in many users' daily lives. To investigate how email features in users lives, particularly how users attend to email, we ran a 2-week study that logged interactions with email and gathered diary entries related to individual sessions. Our study showed that the majority of attentional effort is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management (deleting, moving, flagging emails). We found that participants attended to email primarily based on notifications, instead of the number of unread messages in their inbox. We present our results through answering several questions, and leverage conversation analysis, particularly conversational openings, to explicate several issues. Our findings point to inefficiencies in email as a communication medium, mainly, around how summons are (or are not) issued. This results in an increased burden on email users to maintain engagement and determine (or construct) the appropriate moment for interruption. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS In this article, we have several research contributions on how users attend to email, how email features in their lives, and why there is anxiety involved in email use. • The majority of attentional effort in email is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management and triage (e.g. moving or deleting messages). • Participants in our study respond much more strongly and frequently to notifications about individual messages, as opposed to the overall criticality of the inbox (i.e. the unread count). • Our participants did not use the unread count, even though this is one of the few methods provided for monitoring email. • We leverage conversation analysis (CA), particularly around conversational openings and summonsanswer sequences to explain how email grabs attention. • We also categorize emails into four different types of requests for attention. • Overall, we find that conversations through email increase the burden of determining interruptibility on the receivers of email, when comparing with other mediums (e.g. face-to-face and over the phone).

Feeling interrupted—Being responsive: How online messages relate to affect at work

“…Therefore, future studies might want to pay more attention to the characteristics of specific online media and how persons customize their specific features. For instance, notifications about incoming messages may increase e‐mail's intrusiveness and may increase responsiveness (Hanrahan, Pérez‐Quinones, & Martin, ). Moreover, instant messages might be seen as more urgent than e‐mails.…”

Assessing e-mail intent and tasks in e-mail messages

“…This responsiveness image could be seen as a request for attention. Hanrahan et al [17] analyse responsiveness in a 2-week study by logging user interactions with e-mail and compared these interactions to diary entries of the participants. The authors propose that e-mails can be categorized into 4 groups of requests for attention: ignore, accountable non-answer (engage with message but do not reply), postponed reply and immediate reply.…”

“…For that reason, we evaluate e-mail act as one of the dimensions in our classification scheme. Other dimensions from the literature that we will evaluate are response expectation [17] and source authority [33]. These are related to the message as a whole.…”

“…The most likely actions users make are splitting personal and work-related e-mail by using separate mailboxes [7] and cleaning e-mails at the end of the day [19]. In general, not many users spend effort on general e-mail management (deleting, moving, flagging) [17]. Nevertheless, research indicates that proper categorizations could alleviate the problem of feeling overloaded [2,4,34].…”

Building a Better World with our Information: The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 3

“…Boardman and Sasse, 2004;Jones et al, 2005b; Ravasio et al, 2004. 341 Hanrahan, 2015;Hanrahan et al, 2014;Hanrahan and Pérez-Quiñones, 2015.11.4 BIG CHALLENGES, BIG OPPORTUNITIES IN PIM DESIGN…”