Jerald Schoudt

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.

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.

Enabling efficient orienteering behavior in webmail clients

Webmail clients provide millions of end users with convenient and ubiquitous access to electronic mail - the most successful collaboration tool ever. Web email clients are also the platform of choice for recent innovations on electronic mail and for integration of related information services into email. In the enterprise, however, webmail applications have been relegated to being a supplemental tool for mail access from home or while on the road. In this paper, we draw on recent research in the area of electronic mail to understand usage models and performance requirements for enterprise email applications. We then present an innovative architecture for a webmail client. By leveraging recent advances in web browser technology, we show that webmail clients can offer performance and responsiveness that rivals a desktop application while still retaining all the advantages of a browser based client.

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.

To Buy or Not to Buy? Understanding the Role of Personality Traits in Predicting Consumer Behaviors

In this paper, we explore the role of derived personality traits from Twitter in determining consumer behaviors. We conduct comprehensive analysis on a large industry dataset containing 188,654 individual level purchasing records across over 100 product categories. For each category, we build classifiers to distinguish buyers from non-buyers based on their derived personality traits. We use the models with demographic features as baseline to evaluate the predictive power of personality traits. Our results prove the decisive power of derived personality on a variety of consumer behaviors.

Does Personality Matter?: A Study of Personality and Situational Effects on Consumer Behavior

Personality traits have long been shown to contribute to consumer behaviors. Besides the main effect of personality, it seems also plausible that other factors may impact this relationship. To understand such situational effects, in this study we analyze two possible variables, namely, income and needs. We conduct extensive analysis on a large industry dataset across over 100 product categories. For each category, we build a prediction model for consumption decision based on the derived personality features. We experiment with our prediction models under different conditions segmented by both situational factors. Our results suggest that personalitys decisive power on consumer behavior varies significantly among different income levels, but non-significantly between consumer needs. Together, income and needs also have significant effect on the association between individuals personality and consumption behavior. We conclude this work by discussing the implications of our experiments and how our finding can benefit the design of more personalized recommender systems in real-world settings.

ASIMM: a framework for automatic synthesis of query interfaces for multimedia databases

With the advent of access to digital libraries via the Internet and the addition of non-traditional data, such as imagery, the need for flexible, natural language query environments has become more urgent. This paper describes a new query interface based on the combination of natural language and visual programming techniques. The interface, entitled Drag and Drop English, or DanDE, has two components. The first component is an easy-to-use flexible interface that has the feel of a natural language interface, but has more structure and gives a user more guidance in constructing a query without sacrificing flexibility. The second component is a definition facility that allows the interface designer to specify the structure of a query language. The definition facility allows the designer to specify the syntactic structure of the language in a variation of Backus-Naur Form. The definition facility also provides the ability to specify some of the semantics of the query domain. Lastly, the definition facility allows the designer to specify the interactions between the interface and the query system.