e-mail research targeting the strongenterprisestrong.pdfVIP

HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2005, Volume 20, pp. 139–162 Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. E-Mail Research: Targeting the Enterprise Martin Wattenberg, Steven L. Rohall, Daniel Gruen, and Bernard Kerr IBM Research ABSTRACT The research program at IBM’s® Collaborative User Experience (CUE) group supports an e-mail system used by millions of people. We present three lessons learned from working with real-world enterprise e-mail solutions. First, a prag- matic, system-level approach reveals that e-mail programs are generally used id- iosyncratically, often for many different goals at once. This fact has strong impli- cations for both the design and assessment of new features. Second, we discuss how viewing e-mail as an element of corporate collaboration—not just communi- cation—provides insights into problems with current systems as well as potential solutions. Third, we describe constraints imposed by the realities of software de- velopment and how they shape the space of feasible new designs. Finally, we illus- trate these lessons with an overview of CUE research strategies in the context of Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist with an interest in information vi- sualization and collaboration; he is a researcher in the Collaborative User Ex- perience research group of IBM. Steve Rohall is a computer scientist with an interest in synchronous collaboration, information visualization, and network communications; he is a software architect in the Collaborative User Experi- ence research group of IBM. Dan Gruen is a cognitive scientist with an inter- est in interface design, collaboration, and human activity management; he is a researcher in the Collaborative User Experience research group of IBM. Ber- nard Kerr is a designer with an interest in interac