MailHistory:
Email Analytics for Collaboration Support
CMC - 4 December 2007
Yiming Liu
Email: context
- Global asynchronous messaging system
- Primarily text-based
- The mail metaphor
Email: problem
- Uncertainty - "When will I get a response to this email?"
- silence - a matter of interpretation
- overlooked/too busy to handle/in process of responding/does not care about message
- Responsiveness image (Tyler and Tang, 2006)
- "I usually will get back to email or people the same day, ... it’s rude if you
ask someone for information and they just totally ignore you."
- "I don’t want the people to think that they can get an immediate [sic], I’ll drop anything for you."
- How to handle silence? Follow-up, or not?
- Lack of prior interactions -> lack of context
Design solution: analytics for image reflection
- Create visibility, awareness, accountability - "social translucence"
- Purposes:
- communicate responsiveness image to other users
- verify responsiveness image of self
- Analytic modules + personal visualization + public visualization (subset)
MailAnalytics/MailDynamics: static and dynamic analytics
- Static analysis - plug-in architecture
- Response time
- Traffic volume
- Top corresponders
- Content data / emotion words /etc
- Dynamic analysis - in-client behavior tracking - limited by client
Personal visualization dashboard
- Visualization widgets
- Per-widget settings
- Plug-in architecture
- deeper, contextual client integration possible - limited by client
Public visualization
- Visualization widgets
- Per-widget privacy settings
- Plug-in architecture
- Re-use the personal visualization plug-in for in-client integration
Potential questions
- less anxiety when previous strangers attempt collaboration over email?
- less friction in some collaborative contexts?
- how useful as introspective tool?
- Social networking integration - differentiation of data settings
Conclusions
- Challenges
- Privacy - analytics on client side; only results on public server
- Spam - can verify if user exists behind email address
- Translucent view of other email users
- Projection of responsiveness image: accountability, while allowing deception
