Use Cases

Rather than speculate about how knowledge workers would use our prototype, we decided to evaluate our ideas with real scenarios. As part of our design we were able to procure an email corpus containing thousands of emails from a member of an academic research project. The emails were from a user that covered a six to seven month period and working on several collaborative projects. Within the emails the user could be seen both sending and receiving tasks within varying project groups. In investigating the numerous emails several categories of emails emerged:

  1. Family correspondence
  2. Request for small bits of information: address, phone # (easy reply)
  3. Asking for someone to set up travel arrangements, with details in the email
  4. Back and forth conversation threads about where you will be during vacation plans, trying to arrange a meeting. Email contains contact info, location, time
  5. Responding to multiple questions/issues within the reply
  6. Upcoming meeting email with agenda, document to review, meeting info
  7. One email response to a review of several documents (answering multiple in one email)

We used several of these emails as use cases to see how our design could be used in the varying situations. The following are overviews of scenarios that we extracted from the corpus:

  1. Subject: April payroll issues deadline - In this email we see a HR staff member is asking for pay and staffing changed to be sent to her by a specific.
  2. Subject: EC-US Workshop in Venice – This example involved multiple academics collaborating on a paper and logistics involving who can and should be at the workshop. People include historical email to remind others of the history behind this extended conversation.
  3. Subject: APA task force online research – This series of email involves one member starting up a task force to focus to write a white paper on the important issues involved in psychological research. Feedback was given on a the paper and a conversation ensued over email.
  4. Subject: Board meeting – This conversation involves the emails back and fourth in an attempt to coordinate travel arrangements.
  5. Subject: Using Worktools for our place of conversation – This email went out to multiple people asking them to install software and inform the sender after the software had been installed. The initiator was asking for visibility into when a task is completed.
  6. Subject: RE: meeting dates (Bradshaw, S 7K) – This email is another illustration of visibility between multiple people. “Have you had a chance to check the April 26-28 meeting date with Mahzarin? I'd like to go ahead and notify the group members so they can reserve the date.”
  7. Subject: RE: [INTERNET RESEARCH] new outline and tablegang” – In this single email we see multiple tasks being delegated to multiple people. This is an example of multiple people aware of everyone else’s tasks.
  8. Subject: postcard prices - A worker is clarifying pricing with her boss and assigning responsibility to her coworker as she will be out of town.