Opportunities for automating email processing : a need-finding study
Name
1201913182-MIT.pdf
Size
3.59 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
48229f7742870baa15e0e5ff22677d44
Author(s)
Park, Soya.
Advisor(s)
David R. Karger.
Date Issued
2020
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Email management consumes significant effort from senders and recipients. Some of this work might be automatable. We performed a mixed-methods need-finding study to learn: (i) what sort of automatic email handling users want, and (ii) what kinds of information and computation are needed to support that automation. Our investigation included a design workshop to identify categories of needs, a survey to better understand those categories, and a classification of existing email automation software to determine which needs have been addressed. Our results highlight the need for: a richer data model for rules, more ways to manage attention, leveraging internal and external email context, complex processing such as response aggregation, and affordances for senders. To further investigate our findings, we developed a platform for authoring small scripts over a user's inbox. Of the automations found in our studies, half are impossible in popular email clients, motivating new design directions.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February, 2020
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 45-50).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
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