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.