Academic Literature

Any designers creating a system that intends to merge tasks within email should pay close attention to two principal researchers.

  1. Victoria Bellotti
  2. Jonathan Grudin

We also surveyed over 100 papers, covering a rich cross-section of the CSCW literature.

Victoria Bellotti: Tasks in E-Mail “Must Haves”

Victoria Bellotti is a senior researcher at Xerox Parc. She did extensive field work, examining how users remind themselves what they have to do. Her research helped present us with a very tangible sense of what a task management system in email cannot overlook.

  1. Differentiating important or outstanding items.
  2. Days left indicator turns red. Updated information is indicated.
  3. Keeping track of threads of activity and discussions. Posting to shared tasks provides a threaded conversation.
  4. Managing deadlines and reminders.
  5. Embedding task markup within email.
  6. Collating related items (e.g., an extended thread or responses to a survey) and associated files and links. Use one email, don’t collate.
  7. Getting a task oriented overview vs. inspecting numerous folders. Sorting on “Days Left” or tasks generates a ToDo list.

Bellotti then created a prototype email client called "TaskMaster." TaskMaster introduces the task as a first-class object. TaskMaster presents some very important lessons:

A prototype email client needs to be substantially robust

Because users often depend so heavily on their email client, a prototype needs to be feature complete. Users who relied on features in their personal email clients and did not find similar features in TaskMaster often dropped from the study as soon as they found need for those missing features.

Time left indicator scored very highly for user satisfaction

One of the most popular features was the time left indicator. Users found the way it reduced a string of tasks into an auto-generated prioritized list by due date a compelling feature.

Victoria Bellotti, Taking Email to Task, CHI 03

Jonathan Grudin: Caveats for CSCW Application Designers

Jonathan Grudin performed a retrospective analysis of CSCW applications, looking to understand why so many both start out with such promise, and then fail to deliver on that promise.

He ultimately identifies three common oversights of systems designers. These observations are critical to anyone undertaking the design of an innovative CSCW system.

He suggests that CSCW systems fail because of:

  1. The disparity between those who will benefit from an application and those who must do additional work to support it.
  2. Unique lack of management intuition for CSCW applications.
  3. It is difficult or impossible to create a group in the lab that will reflect the social, motivational, economic, and political factors that are central to group performance.

Why CSCW Applications Fail, Jonathan Grudin, CSCW 1998

Academic Interviews