Hernan Badenes

Am I wasting my time organizing email?: a study of email refinding

We all spend time every day looking for information in our email, yet we know little about this refinding process. Some users expend considerable preparatory effort creating complex folder structures to promote effective refinding. However modern email clients provide alternative opportunistic methods for access, such as search and threading, that promise to reduce the need to manually prepare. To compare these different refinding strategies, we instrumented a modern email client that supports search, folders, tagging and threading. We carried out a field study of 345 long-term users who conducted over 85,000 refinding actions. Our data support opportunistic access. People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviors are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success. In contrast, both search and threading promote more effective finding. We present design implications: current search-based clients ignore scrolling, the most prevalent refinding behavior, and threading approaches need to be extended.

Tag-it, snag-it, or bag-it: combining tags, threads, and folders in e-mail

We describe the design of bluemail, a web-based email system that provides message tagging, message threading, and email folders. We wanted to explore how this combination of features would help users manage and organize their email. We conducted a limited field test of the prototype by observing how users triage their own email using bluemail. Our study identified ways in which users liked tagging, threading, and foldering capabilities, but also some of the complex ways in which they can interact. Our study elicited early user input to guide the iterative design of these features. It also involved a user study researcher, designer, and developer in the field test to quickly integrate different perspectives during development.

Community insights: helping community leaders enhance the value of enterprise online communities

Online communities are increasingly being deployed in enterprises to increase productivity and share expertise. Community leaders are critical for fostering successful communities, but existing technologies rarely support leaders directly, both because of a lack of clear data about leader needs, and because existing tools are member- rather than leader-centric. We present the evidence-based design and evaluation of a novel tool for community leaders, Community Insights (CI). CI provides actionable analytics that help community leaders foster healthy communities, providing value to both members and the organization. We describe empirical and system contributions derived from a long-term deployment of CI to leaders of 470 communities over 10 months. Empirical contributions include new data showing: (a) which metrics are most useful for leaders to assess community health, (b) the need for and how to design actionable metrics, (c) the need for and how to design contextualized analytics to support sensemaking about community data. These findings motivate a novel community system that provides leaders with useful, actionable and contextualized analytics.

System U: automatically deriving personality traits from social media for people recommendation

This paper presents a system, System U, which automatically derives peoples personality traits from social media and recommends people for different tasks. The system leverages linguistic signals appearing in a persons social media activities to compute the personality portraits including Big Five personality, fundamental needs and basic human values. This system and technology can be used in a wide variety of personalized applications, such as recommending people to answer questions.

Global differences in attributes of email usage

Email usage data from users in a large enterprise were analyzed according to country and geographical regions to explore for differences. Data of 13,877 employees from 29 countries in a global technology company were analyzed. We found statistically significant differences in several attributes of email usage. Users in the U.S. tend to retain larger numbers of email messages while Latin American countries keep fewer messages. European countries tend to file more of their email into folders and Asian countries tend to do less so. These differences in filing behavior are not correlated with Hofstedes Uncertainty Avoidance Index. This research adds another dimension for studies of email usage which previously have not reported the geographical source of their data.

Finding someone in my social directory whom i do not fully remember or barely know

REACH is an intelligent, people-finding system that helps users to find someone in their social directory, especially those whom they do not fully remember or barely know. It analyzes a users communication and social networking data to automatically extract all the contacts and derive multiple facets to characterize each contact in relation to the user. It then employs a personalized, faceted search to retrieve and present a ranked list of matched contacts based on their properties. A preliminary evaluation shows the effectiveness of our approach.

CommunityCompare: visually comparing communities for online community leaders in the enterprise

Online communities are important in enterprises, helping workers to build skills and collaborate. Despite their unique and critical role fostering successful communities, community leaders have little direct support in existing technologies. We introduce CommunityCompare, an interactive visual analytic system to enable leaders to make sense of their communitys activity with comparisons. Composed of a parallel coordinates plot, various control widgets, and a preview of example posts from communities, the system supports comparisons with hundreds of related communities on multiple metrics and the ability to learn by example. We motivate and inform the system design with formative interviews of community leaders. From additional interviews, a field deployment, and surveys of leaders, we show how the system enabled leaders to assess community performance in the context of other comparable communities, learn about community dynamics through data exploration, and identify examples of top performing communities from which to learn. We conclude by discussing how our system and design lessons generalize.

They Said What?: Exploring the Relationship Between Language Use and Member Satisfaction in Communities

In online communities, satisfied members are essential to community success, since they are more likely to contribute and consume content, engage with other members, and feel committed to the community. However, it is difficult for community leaders to know, on an on-going basis, whether members are satisfied. In this paper, we explore the relationship between member satisfaction and language use within content posted in workplace online communities. We hope to find patterns of language use that are associated with satisfied members. We employ linguistic analysis based on LIWC, and a survey to directly measure member satisfaction in 142 workplace communities. We contribute a better understanding of how members interact in effective workplace communities, and show that linguistic analysis could be a useful part of future methods to automatically assess community member satisfaction.

Goals and perceived success of online enterprise communities: what is important to leaders & members?

Online communities are successful only if they achieve their goals, but there has been little direct study of goals. We analyze novel data characterizing the goals of enterprise online communities, assessing the importance of goals for leaders, how goals influence member perceptions of community value, and how goals relate to success measures proposed in the literature. We find that most communities have multiple goals and common goals are learning, reuse of resources, collaboration, networking, influencing change, and innovation. Leaders and members agree that all of these goals are important, but their perceptions of success on goals do not align with each other, or with commonly used behavioral success measures. We conclude that simple behavioral measures and leader perceptions are not good success metrics, and propose alternatives based on specific goals members and leaders judge most important.

Agile development meets strategic design in the enterprise

In this paper we present our approach to design and develop an enterprise email application called bluemail. We describe our development process that is orchestrated for fast, iterative deployments and aimed at offering increased transparency to our internal user community. We finish by discussing the relationship between iterative design and agile development practices.