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"If a person is emailing you, it just doesn't make sense": Exploring Changing Consumer Behaviors in Email

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Much of the existing research literature on email use focuses on productivity or work settings. However, personal use of email has rarely been studied in depth. With the growth of messaging platforms being used for an increasing amount of personal communication, yet email use remaining high, we were interested in learning what Americans are using email for in their daily lives in 2016. To explore this topic, we use qualitative data from over 150 interviews with personal email users as well as quantitative data from several larger survey-based studies. We will show that personal email use is very different from what has been previously studied by workplace researchers and that daily use is largely focused on receiving and viewing B2C messages such as coupons, deals, receipts, and event notifications with personal communication over email diminished to a rarer, less-than-daily occurrence. We discuss the implications of this for the design of email and communications clients and present a design and prototype for an application that seeks to support these more frequent uses of consumer email.

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  • (2021)Exploring Email-Prompted Information NeedsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34798615:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
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  • (2020)Rethinking Consumer Email: The Research Process for Yahoo Mail 6Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3334480.3375224(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2020
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2017
      7138 pages
      ISBN:9781450346559
      DOI:10.1145/3025453
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 02 May 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. b2c
      2. communication
      3. consumer
      4. coupons
      5. deals
      6. email
      7. messaging
      8. mobile devices

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2021)Exploring Email-Prompted Information NeedsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34798615:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
      • (2021)Investigating Physical Interaction With Digital Data Through the Materialization of Email HandlingInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwab00332:5-6(457-474)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2021
      • (2020)Rethinking Consumer Email: The Research Process for Yahoo Mail 6Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3334480.3375224(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2020
      • (2020)Exploring the Quality, Efficiency, and Representative Nature of Responses Across Multiple Survey PanelsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376671(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
      • (2020)Why Johnny Can't Unsubscribe: Barriers to Stopping Unwanted EmailProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376165(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
      • (2019)Opportunities for Automating Email ProcessingProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300604(1-12)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
      • (2019)"Wait, Do I Know This Person?"Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300520(1-13)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
      • (2018)Personalized Behavior-Powered Systems for Guiding Self-ExperimentsExtended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3170427.3173017(1-4)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2018
      • (2017)Multi-Channel Topic-Based Mobile Messaging in Romantic RelationshipsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/31346551:CSCW(1-18)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
      • (2017)It's All About CouponsProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3027063.3053339(1152-1160)Online publication date: 6-May-2017

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