Keystroke level analysis of email message organization

Abstract

Organization of email messages takes an increasing amount of time for many email users. Research has demonstrated that users develop very different strategies to handle this organization. In this paper, the relationship between the different organization strategies and the time necessary to use a certain strategy is illustrated by a mathematical model based on keystroke-level analysis. The model estimates time usage for archiving and retrieving email messages for individual users. Besides explaining why users develop different strategies to organize email messages, the model can also be used to advise users individually when to start using folders, clean messages, learn the search functionality, and using filters to store messages. Similar models could assist evaluation of different interface designs where the number of items increase with time.