personal information management directlyinto their favorite workspaces.In this article, we further explore these newand unanticipated uses of e-mail and suggestpotential design ideas to better support them.We present the findings from four months offield work conducted at three companies andensuing analysis during which we confirmedand expanded some of our earlier intuitionsabout the use of e-mail as a PIM tool. We con-clude that e-mail is definitely overloaded, butalso that this phenomenon depends on factorssuch as a user’s role and the nature of theirworkplace.A Field StudyPreceding the work reported here, extensivefield work on PIM and e-mail was conductedin a series of studies. We conducted more than60 formal and informal interviews with PCusers in professions ranging from the creativeE-mail and Personal InformationManagementE-mail has become more like a habitat than anapplication. It is used for a wide range of tasks.such as information management, and forcoordination and collaboration in organiza-tions. Our research shows that e-mail is notonly the place in which a great deal of work isreceived and delegated, it is also increasinglyused as a portal for access to online publica-tions and information services. It has becomethe place where personal computer (PC) usersspend much of their work days (the applica-tion is always on and is often the focus ofattention). Moreover, the burgeoning quanti-ties of messages and attachments that e-maildelivers to people each day has led users to co-opt it as a personal information management(PIM) tool. In fact this simply follows fromwhat we have found to be a common tenden-cy of knowledge workers, which is to embed30interactions...september + october 2001E-mail as HabitatE-mail as HabitatAn Exploration of Embedded Personal Information ManagementNICOLAS DUCHENEAUT AND VICTORIA BELLOTTI31arts to business and administration to scientif-ic (including site visits, face-to-face inter-views, and phone surveys in the USA andUK). From this research, one of the authors,while designing a prototype information man-agement tool, observed the following about e-mail for PC users:✽ Many people use e-mail throughoutthe day✽ E-mail is the major means of non–face-to-face communication✽ E-mail is now the main means of doc-ument exchange✽ E-mail is co-opted by its users formany information management func-tions, such as to-dos (by marking up orresending oneself messages) and con-tact management (by sorting by nameand filtering)✽ E-mail is overloaded, providing inade-quate support for certain tasks it is rou-tinely used to accomplish.Curious about these findings, we decidedto gather more detailed information aboutcurrent information management behaviors ofe-mail users. To obtain three different organi-zational snapshots of well-evolved e-mail prac-tices, we conducted 28 interviews at threeorganizations that have experience with e-mail(the names of the last two organizations havebeen replaced with fictitious ones):✽ Xerox PARC, a large, establishedresearch center where the authorswork. PARC has about 400 staffmembers in one building on a smallXerox campus in Palo Alto, Califor-nia. Most employees belong to anapproximately 5- to 10-person groupin one of six labs. Researchers conductmainly intra- but also some cross-labprojects, which may be more or lesscommercially oriented. Each employeeinteractions...september + october 2001Nicolas Ducheneaut and Victoria BellottiXerox PARC3333 Coyote Hill RoadPalo Alto, CA [email protected],[email protected](650) 812-400032interactions...september + october 2001has a private office, generally locatednear the rest of his or her group (10interviews).✽ MediaWorld, a 150-person, rapidlyexpanding, multimedia productioncompany that produces animated con-tent for Web sites. MediaWorldemployees are divided into many dif-ferent types of groups, including writ-ers, artists, animators, engineers, Webdesigners, quality control specialists,and marketers. The offices are open-plan and spread over two buildings onthe same block in San Francisco; peo-ple are located near members with sim-ilar roles (12 interviews).✽ LeadDesign, a six-person, design con-sulting firm working typically on short-er projects. Not all employees arefull-time; two spend a considerableamount of time working on privateprojects for other clients. Their skills ingraphics, HTML, and Web program-ming are targeted toward corporateimage and Web design. Although theyshare office space, they often workremotely and often collaborate withtheir clients remotely (sixinterviews).What We DidDrawing on earlierresearch, we designed aloosely structured question-naire on the uses of e-mail forPIM and work processes. We conducted theinterviews at the workplace of each of theinterviewees and asked them to show us thecontents of their e-mail to illustrate theiranswers. We asked them a series of specificquestions for background information andthen about e-mail. The questions about e-mailwere developed from findings in the previous,more open-ended research on personal infor-mation management and the role of e-mailmentioned earlier.The entire proceeding was video recordedand, when possible, we tried to use the camerato capture the details of the interviewees’ folderorganization and the general organization ofmessages. We also digitally photographed inter-viewees’ workspaces and some surroundingareas (to document something of their oppor-tunities for face-to-face communication).Each of the tapes was transcribed and pho-tos and images inserted into the transcript.We collated the results using various qualita-tive and quantitative analysis methods tounderstand the data. Some of the results ofthese analyses are presented in the followingsubsections.What We FoundThe individuals in our sample are fairly expe-rienced in their profession on average (eightyears) with extensive e-mail experience (11years on average), but it is interesting to notethat they are relatively recent users of theircurrent application (three years). The range ofeither incoming or outgoing communica-tion volume is extremely wide, fromthree to 100 messages per day(incoming mean, 42 and median,40; outgoing mean, 17 and median,12). For these people, e-mail hasdefinitely become a to-do list; 72percent of our respondents sendreminders to themselves and 83 per-cent leave messages in their inbox asreminders.Folder Organization and Finding: What isEfficient?Recently Bälter [1] published a