Email Communication Case Study
Role
UI/UX Designer, Graphic Designer, User Researcher
Timeline
Semester-long project in Spring 2021
This UX design case study developed a network for rural high school students to aid in their post-graduate planning. NorthStar is not only a user-friendly way of providing information, but it also fosters an online community for students to engage with their peers.
Overview
Email correspondence has changed drastically since its inception. What was once a novel Computer-mediated communication (CMC) tool for effective long-distance communication has now become an overloaded, often unmanageable mass of varying importance. The pandemic has only exacerbated these problems, as organizations underwent digital transformation and relied more heavily on email to exchange information. This study, conducted in a team of 6, works to define email overload, examine the current affordances of email management in Gmail, and generate usable solutions to refurbish email communication in a world of information overload. We hypothesized that the majority of college students approach email management as a monotonous but necessary activity and oftentimes feel overwhelmed dealing with heavy influxes of unread emails.
Our goal was to understand how different information layering strategies for highlighting important emails could contribute to users task coordination and work efficiency. Our project looked into filtering information to the top of inboxes and creating a strategy to present to the user the important excerpts of messages so that the user will feel less overwhelmed. We prototyped these features in Figma, which can be viewed here.
The Problem
Email users have grown used to the monotony and annoyance of emails, leading to frustrations in email management and decrease in communication efficiency.
Idea
Based on the results of interviews of Cornell students, our team designed additional features that could be incorporated into Gmail’s existing user interface through Figma. These features included an automatic label suggestion, a Gmail manager that summarizes changes to a user’s inbox since they were gone, and a reply nudge similar to Gmail’s existing “Follow up” nudge. These features were designed to ease the burdens of managing an email account. Further, we were able to use the set of features to better understand email as a CMC tool and contribute to existing research on managing large amounts of messages.
Challenges
We only had access to testing and interviewing Cornell University students. This population receives very similar messages to one another and may have similar work ethics or organizational styles as a result of being students. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted students somewhat similarly compared to the general population due to the shared experience with Cornell’s policies and communication standards. This prevents the results of the study and prototype evaluation from being generalizable to a larger population.
To better apply our results, more research would need to be done on a more diverse population. However, we were also limited by a short time frame. The usage of the features in our prototype would need to be implemented into Gmail (potentially as a plugin) and evaluated over a longer period of time to see how users interacted with it in more realistic scenarios. The prototype would benefit from longitudinal evaluation studies to inform us on its effectiveness and highlight issues for revision.
Email Summary
The Gmail Manager was designed to assist users in sifting through their emails and determining which to interact with. It provides users with a summary organized by where emails have come from and highlights emails that might need replies. It also has a fun fact, which we hoped could address the monotony of email management and contribute some positive emotion to interaction.
The manager offers a condensed version of the communications from the last time the user checked their email. This prevents a user from needing to scrape through messages constantly by providing a brief overview. In testing this, users were extremely receptive to the idea. Interestingly, many users commented on enjoying the fun fact at the top, which suggests a desire for email interfaces to appear friendlier and more light-hearted.
This feature was very quickly adopted as well, and nearly all users we tested on were able to find the manager and understand the contents quickly. Having a feature such as this, where there is no barrier to learning, could be valuable for improving email experiences.
Label Suggestions
The automatic label suggestion was designed to address the time consuming nature of organizing emails that some first interview participants brought up. These labels would use previous label usage and text recognition to determine which of the user’s labels best fits an email and suggest it to them. It could also suggest new labels, perhaps based on the label the sender applied to the message, though we did not explore this concept in-depth.
The label suggestion was most successful when testing on users who were already familiar with Gmail’s system of labels. This method of adding labels improves on the current system of applying a label, which requires clicking an icon on the toolbar, then scrolling to find the appropriate label. In our version, labels are immediately visible and actionable which users though would allow for easier organization.
Reply Nudges
The reply nudge was designed to address the issue of determining what emails were important and might need interaction. It would utilize subject lines and the sender’s relationship with the user to inform these suggestions.
The current reply and follow up nudges. (Source)
While the concept of message nudges is already a feature in Gmail, it is has a few flaws our team improved on. Firstly, it is visibly very similar the the “follow up” nudge, which users may not prioritize at the same level as a simple reply. Secondly, the reply nudges only appeared after a few days, whereas many email communications require responses under a shorter time frame. For instance, an email from another student asking about collaboration on an assignment would need to be replied to quickly, otherwise the deadline would pass.
The messages that require replies would also be featured in the aforementioned manager, which further highlights messages that the user needs to respond to.
The Takeaway
We confirmed our hypothesis that users have grown used to the monotony and annoyance of emails, contributing to the study of email overload. We identified the forces behind email overload, and generated a prototype that both helps organize inboxes and revitalizes human computer-mediated communication through Gmail. This design serves to sift through and summarize your email influx, enabling users to more personally react and respond to the correspondences they receive. The prototype plays a key role in the study of email management, showing a need for more assistive organizational tools in mainstream email platforms. We hope to see more research concerning email management after the pandemic and more ideas for improving email management workflow.