Building behavioural archetypes from academic research
Interviewing users can take considerable time and effort. While user interviews are absolutely worth doing, it’s also possible to get rich insights from academic research — without being an academic.
In my case, I’m the Senior UX Designer for a privacy-focused email service with a web UI and mobile app. Human-computer interaction(HCI) generally has decades of research (others have made good recommendations on to-reads here and here) and email sits in a well-researched area called Personal Information Management(PIM).
I started dabbling with academic papers to start with through google but the best central repository for HCI and PIM is the ACM Digital Library. ACM is now where I start searching more often than not, expanding my results by carefully combing through the reference lists of the most valuable papers that I find. Conference posters are great because they give good summaries of the field of study and the research findings, but reading full research results is incredibly valuable.
To be sure that a paper is worth considering, I always check the credentials of the authors — do they work in the relevant area, are they a PHD candidate or a career researcher, is this their first and only publication etc. The next important thing to check — even if the author appears to be legit is the type, size and representativeness of any research done i.e. how did they recruit participants, how many people did they test with, and did they recruit a representative sample across age, genders, etc. Finally, has the paper been cited by other authors in the field.
The seminal text for email is by Whittaker and Sidner — Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email which was published in 1996. The sampling is dubious BUT, this paper has been cited nearly 900 times, and most importantly its results have been tested, confirmed and expanded upon in several subsequent papers by multiple authors.
The research I found described some clear behavioural archetypes. I didn’t have a lot of time between all the other UX work (I’m a solo UX designer) so user interviews weren’t very practical to fit in. What I did have cause for is user testing where I make a habit of doing short interviews with participants regardless of what or how I’m testing. These short interviews confirmed what I had found in the academic research and proved that our use case was not somehow special or different. Proving your use case isn’t special or different is a (depressingly) important step in many businesses.
The result of my research is three behavioural archetypes. Behavioural archetypes capture user behaviour, how they think feel and act in a given situation (more on archetypes here). By understanding the varied email management archetypes, we are able to prioritise what we build and make informed decisions about how to best serve our customers.
Behavioural archetypes for email management
People use a variety of different strategies for managing their emails. While each user’s habits depend on a range of factors — personality circumstances etc — there are distinct groupings of behaviours. These groupings are defined as three behavioural archetypes. Behavioural archetypes don’t describe a particular person though most people will recognise their own patterns of behaviour in a single archetype.
Frequent filer
Frequent filers “live in their inboxes” with a system of folders, rules and filters keeping their inbox as a small and viable to-do list.
Their priority is to get as close to zero messages as is possible.
Their inbox over time maintains a small number of messages regardless of the volume of incoming mail.
Spring Cleaner
Spring cleaners like some organisation and they “clear” their inbox occasionally so it stays at a level they feel is manageable.
Their priority is to have everything important above the fold (or nearly)
Their inbox over time sees a pattern of accumulating mail before a precipitous drop which repeats in a cyclical manner.
Big Inbox
Big inboxers accumulate all messages in their inbox, less likely to send messages or respond, but take unsubscribing seriously.
Their priority is to have good visibility of messages as they come in.
Their inbox over time grows with every new message that arrives.
Changing habits
While some people may be habitually one archetype all the time, others can switch depending on the circumstances. Here’s a couple of made-up examples:
This is J. J works as an SEO specialist for a small digital agency. Email is where he communicates with clients most so when it come to his work email, J is a Frequent Filer. For his personal email though, J doesn’t worry so much. It’s not that his personal email is full of junk — it has things he wants to read like industry news, bills and online orders. So in his personal Inbox, J is a Spring Cleaner.
This is H. H has never organised their email before and know it won’t ever be a habit. H is a Big Inbox person — usually. H is looking for work so they’re making an effort to delete useless emails as they come in and use folders called “Job Stuff” and “Important stuff”. While they’re looking for work H is a bonafide Spring Cleaner but once they get that job offer it’s back to Big Inbox-ing.
Moments that matter
Where do we have to get things right for each archetype?
The moment that matters most for Frequent Filers is Task Management, of moderate importance is Triage, Archive and Retrieval. Flow is of the lowest importance.
Spring Cleaners’ most important moment is Triage with archive and retrieval coming a close and equal second. Task management and Flow are of moderate importance to Spring Cleaners.
Big Inboxers care most about Flow and Retrieval. Triage is of moderate importance. Task management and Archive are not important to Big inbox-ers at all.
But are they MICE
Archetypes should be Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. The three archetypes I captured through this research don’t cover my entire product; for example, these archetypes don’t describe their purchasing behaviour. Even without purchasing behaviour, when it comes to the product we know so much about what our users need, want and how we can serve them best. The next step is digging into the data to see what proportion of our users are represented by which archetype. That’s for another day.
You can see the full archetypes on my Behance.
The relevant research
Bellotti, Victoria & Ducheneaut, Nicolas & Howard, Mark & Smith, Ian. (2003). Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email Tool. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings. 345–352. 10.1145/642611.642672.
Danyel Fisher, A. J. Brush, Eric Gleave, and Marc A. Smith. 2006. Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner’s “email overload” ten years later. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW ‘06). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 309–312. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/1180875.1180922
Jacek Gwizdka. 2004. Email task management styles: the cleaners and the keepers. In CHI ’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘04). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1235–1238. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/985921.986032
Joel Mackenzie, Kshitiz Gupta, Fang Qiao, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, and Milad Shokouhi. 2019. Exploring User Behavior in Email Re-Finding Tasks. InThe World Wide Web Conference (WWW ‘19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1245–1255. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313450
Kalman, Y.M. and Ravid, G. (2015), Filing, Piling, and Everything In Between: The Dynamics of E-mail Inbox Management. J Assn Inf Sci Tec, 66: 2540–2552. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23337
Whittaker, Steve & Matthews, Tara & Cerruti, Julian & Badenes, Hernan & Tang, John. (2011). Am I wasting my time organizing email?. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — Proceedings. 3449–3458. 10.1145/1978942.1979457.
