Hanrahan-etal2016

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Hanrahan-etal2016
BibType ARTICLE
Key Hanrahan-etal2016
Author(s) Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, David Martin
Title Attending to email
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, email, user studies
Publisher
Year 2016
Language English
City
Month
Journal Interacting with Computers
Volume 28
Number 3
Pages 253–272
URL Link
DOI 10.1093/iwc/iwu048
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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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.

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