KM Blog

Interesting Comments for Future Work

I extracted main ideas of our class readings, in particular, I am interested in suggestions of future work.

E-mail as Habitat: An Exploration of Embedded PIM (Bellotti, V. & Ducheneaut, N.)

"E-mail has been the knowledge workers’ new electronic habitat, because personal information management (PIM) is embedded where it is most needed and accessible, that is, in e-mail."

Limitation of E-mail

Users want immediate access to information, which limits efficiency of folder organization and the depth of a useful filing structure.

Implications and suggestions

"E-mail as a PIM tool should have more flexible organization of folders. Because users mostly work with ephemeral information, a cache of recently accessed items could be useful.
Incorporation of document management features inside the e-mail client would make sense.
Providing a different design, with different e-mail management options, depending on a user’s role could improve user interfaces."

Understanding Sequence and Reply Relationships within Email Conversations:
A Mixed-Model Visualization (Neustaedter, C. & Venolia, G. D.)

Two models in conflict:
· Sequential Model of Conversation
· Tree Model of Conversation
Solution of conflict is a mixed-model, which strongly supports the two models simultaneously with a visualization design.

Suggestions to improve the mixed-model visualization

· "It could be more compact: The actual message content is small compared with the surrounding graphics. A more compact visualization would allow more relationships to be visible at a glance.
· The visualization should not be overkill for simple conversation, which incurs more cost than benefit. "

Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email tool (Bellotti, V., Ducheneaut, N., Howard, M. & Smith, I.)

Glossary:

Threads: Series of topically related messages and replies.

Addressing: Whether each message was individual, multiple or list addressed, implying its likely import in terms of thread tracking.

Interdependent task: Task with obligations that also depend on the to-dos of others. These are characterized by complex threads of email and other communication such as phone calls waiting for responses that enable progress.

The Taskmaster design philosophy is to distinguish Taskmaster from an ordinary mail tool.

Thrasks: Threaded Task-Centric Collections

"Interdependent tasks comprise threads of message files, links and drafts, so taskmaster supports semi-automatic collections of these items, which we call "‘thrask’.

"Taskmaster differs from collation systems that track threads since thrasks go beyond system-defined threads to encompass user-defined task-centric collections. The advantage in Taskmaster is that drafts can be saved within the thrask to which they relate, in the context of the related messages that may need to be accessed in their creation, while classic mail tools put drafts in a separate folder out of context, where they may be easily be forgotten."

Equality for All Content

"The thrask model was made more powerful by elevating documents and links to be first-class citizens, therefore, in Taskmaster, important documents and links are much easier to get at. Taskmaster also saves time wasted opening uninteresting attachments because it displays documents and links in the preview pane."

Limitation of Taskmaster

l Taskmaster has technical limitations (e.g. sensitivity to variations in PC configurations) and missing features (e.g. printing and feedback about address completion, omitted due to limited engineering time resources).

l Taskmaster has only a tiny fraction of the feature enhancements that Outlook provides; therefore, switching back and forth to Outlook to use features of Taskmaster is impractical.

Implications and Suggestions

l Thasks could be blended with folders for archival purposes, because Taskmaster’s thrasks are both reliable at collecting threaded messages, attachments and links and a successful in organizing message content.

l "Taskmaster needs better layout solution, because the layout of the three panes of Taskmaster was fixed and the bottom pane was not large enough. These problems take us back to wasting time on window management. Another proposed refinement is to provide a fully functional application preview pane so that items could be manipulated without ever having to open an application."

l "Taskmaster could affect positively email users by embedding task management resources directly in the inbox, where they are most needed, as well as breaking down the barriers between the various components of contemporary email application. "

Posted by judith at February 22, 2003 11:13 PM