‘Dealing with My Emails’: Latent user needs in email management.

摘要

Email is a communication channel that provides a number of benefits. It can be stored, retrieved and forwarded. It also allows a recipient to choose when to uptake communication and how to pace it. However, email also incurs one prevalent cost: the feeling of email overload. One of the reasons leading to that feeling lays in the fact that current email clients do not provide an inbox structure that facilitates email prioritization, information structuring and work-flow management. The goal of this study was to understand the latent user needs regarding handling emails. We identified six such needs: three pertaining to email organization (email annotation, reliable structure and no urgency to classify) and three related to email retrieval (informative overview, flexible sorting and efficient search). We further investigated the dominance, importance and dependencies between these needs. The results were then discussed and implications for future inbox design were proposed.