Finding Email in a Multi-Account, Multi-Device World
Physical and Digital Collections
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Cecchinato, Marta E.
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Sellen, Abigail
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Shokouhi, Milad
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Smyth, Gavin
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.1200-1210
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Email is far from dead; in fact the volume of messages exchanged daily, the
number of accounts per user, and the number of devices on which email is
accessed have been constantly growing. Most previous studies on email have
focused on management and retrieval behaviour within a single account and on a
single device. In this paper, we examine how people find email in today's
ecosystem through an in-depth qualitative diary study with 16 participants. We
found that personal and work accounts are managed differently, resulting in
diverse retrieval strategies: while work accounts are more structured and thus
email is retrieved through folders, personal accounts have fewer folders and
users rely primarily on the built-in search option. Moreover, retrieval occurs
primarily on laptops and PCs compared to smartphones. We explore the reasons,
and uncover barriers and workarounds related to managing multiple accounts and
devices. Finally, we consider new design possibilities for email clients to
better support how email is used today.