Understanding re-finding behavior in naturalistic email interaction logs

Abstract

In this paper we present a longitudinal, naturalistic study of email behavior (n=47) and describe our efforts at isolating re-finding behavior in the logs through various qualitative and quantitative analyses. The presented work underlines the methodological challenges faced with this kind of research, but demonstrates that it is possible to isolate refinding behavior from email interaction logs with reasonable accuracy. Using the approaches developed we uncover interesting aspects of email re-finding behavior that have so far been impossible to study, such as how various features of email-clients are used in re-finding and the difficulties people encounter when using these. We explain how our findings could influence the design of email-clients and outline our thoughts on how future, more in depth analyses, can build on the work presented here to achieve a fuller understanding of email behavior and the support that people need.

Exploring Query Patterns in Email Search

“…The mean character length of queries was 5.87 and many were only partial words. Although in line with our previous analyses [6], this is much shorter than reported elsewhere in the literature with 1.6 words being reported for desktop search [4] and 12.1 characters for web page re-finding [16]. It is also shorter than the 1.4 words reported for lab-based studies of email re-finding [7].…”

“…In contrast with the re-use patterns for queries it seems that very few emails are re-clicked over long time gaps with only 356 of 3910 in total (9.1%) being re-clicked more than 30 days apart. As we reported previously in [6], there is evidence in our data for a small number of messages having long lifespans.…”

“…The only lab-based study of email re-finding in the literature found similar trends [7] with approximately 60% of queries containing a reference to named entities and 40% containing a reference to a person. In our previous work we reported on a naturalistic study of email re-finding behaviour [6]. This work revealed several important aspects of email search behavior.…”

“…Full details of the data collected can be found in our previous publication [6]. 47 participants with diverse backgrounds (37 male, 10 female, aged 21-49, from 7 countries) volunteered to take part over a period of 4 months.…”

“…Chains are ended when there is a gap between message clicks of 5 minutes or more (as has been used before in desktop search), a new query or a re-start of the email-client. We chose to analyse query chains as our previous work found the overwhelming majority of re-finding attempts with an email-client started with a search query [6] and therefore they serve as good proxies for re-finding behaviour. A second benefit is that this gives us a dataset in a similar form to search engine logs where each individual query is associated with a set of clicked items.…”