Design and evaluation of human-centered electronic mail address system
Abstract
The objective of this study is to design a human-centered e-mail address system, based on networking technology and cognitive ergonomics. Based on the background literature and the results of users' survey, a conceptual model is developed for designing e-mail addresses. This model consists of e-mail address components of formats, domain length, meaningfulness, orientation, and information type pertaining to memorization and recall, information association, and categorization. Five hypotheses were proposed to test the conceptual model, and four experiments were conducted with 85 subjects to test the hypotheses. The dependent variables were performance time, error rate, and degree of satisfaction and the independent variables were components of the e-mail addresses. The hypothesis is supported, that using hybrid formats results in better performance of recall than for letter format. The hypotheses are supported, which indicate that two, three, and four characters are the best domain lengths for recall, and that using telephone orientation causes better performance of recall and information association than postal orientation. The hypotheses that embedding both geographical and organizational information in e-mail addresses results in better performance of information association and categorization than embedding only organizational information are partially supported. The main results of the four experiments indicated the following: (1) For recall task, lower total performance time (26.2%) and error rate (75%) were derived for the hybrid formats (digits and letters) than for the letter format. (2) For recall task, lower total performance time (20.2%), and error rate (86.2%) were derived for meaningful domains than for meaningless domains. (3) For recall task, two, three, and four characters were the best single domain lengths. (4) For information association task, embedding both geographical information and organizational information decreased the response time (10.9%), and decreased the level of satisfaction (26.6%), in comparison to only embedding organizational information. (5) For categorization task, embedding both geographical information and organizational information decreased response time (40.7%) in comparison to only embedding organizational information. This research demonstrates the importance of human-centered design and provides guidelines in effectively designing e-mail address system.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Salvendy, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Industrial engineering|Computer science
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