Taking Email To Task

Speaker
Ian E. Smith
Research Staff, PARC Incorporated

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

This will be a talk in two parts. The first part will be a brief (say, 10 mins) overview of PARC’s computer science lab with a few snapshots of what various people are doing in the lab. I’ll try to answer questions about the various projects if people have them!

In the second part, I’ll discuss our recently accepted CHI paper called “Taking email to task.” This section will focus on the design of a novel prototype, TaskMaster, that embeds task management resources directly in an email client. The idea of making email more task-centric came from field investigations of personal information management in which email emerged as a central locus for information management online. The adoption of the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology by our research team allowed fieldwork to directly shape the design rather than taking its usual place as a basis for critiquing design. I’ll try to address some common myths and surprising findings about XP along the way.

TaskMaster was optimized for testing on real mission-critical email in a two-week evaluation. Some users continued to use the tool in preference to Outlook, long after the evaluation study was ended. Since TaskMaster had only a small fraction of the features of Outlook, the task management features it embodied were clearly advantageous enough, for several users, to make up for its many limitations. In addition our user evaluation has provided us with a great deal of inspiring feedback about how to improve on our design.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Ian Smith is a member of the research staff at PARC Incorporated. His work focuses on the integration of software development tools and practices with ethnographic techniques in user interface development. He has published numerous papers in conferences such as the ACM symposium on user interface software, ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work, and the ACM conference on human-computer interaction. He currently has eleven United States patents pending. In 1998, he was granted a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. He lives in San Francisco, California with his wife, Valerie.