ContactMap: Using Personal Social Networks - 1 ________________________________________________________________________ Authors’ addresses: Steve Whittaker, AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ, 07932, USA; Quentin Jones, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA; Bonnie A. Nardi, Agilent Laboratories Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA; Michael Creech, BlueOak Software, Los Altos, CA, 94024, USA; Loren Terveen, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA; Ellen Isaacs, Izix.com Consulting, CA, 94002, USA; John Hainsworth, Princeton University, NJ, 08544, USA. Permission to make digital/hard copy of part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication, and its date of appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © 2002 ACM 1073-0516/01/0300-0034 $5.00 ContactMap: using personal social networks to organize communication in a social desktop STEVE WHITTAKER 1 , QUENTIN JONES 2 , BONNIE NARDI 3 , MIKE CREECH 4 , LOREN TERVEEN 5 , ELLEN ISAACS 6 , JOHN HAINSWORTH 7 ________________________________________________________________ A shared physical workplace is a rich social and informational environment. Tasks such as managing communication commitments, keeping track of collaborators and friends, and “social data mining” of local expertise for advice and information are supported naturally by a shared physical workplace. However, many people now collaborate remotely using tools such as email and voicemail. Our field studies show that these tools do not support processes such as social reminding or social data mining. In part, this is because these tools are organized around messages, rather than people. In response to this problem, and informed by our field studies, we created ContactMap, a system that makes people the primary unit of interaction. ContactMap provides a structured visual representation of the important people in the user’s social network; this representation directly supports social reminding and social data mining. We conducted an empirical evaluation of ContactMap, comparing it with traditional email systems on tasks motivated by our fieldwork. Users performed better with ContactMap than their usual email system, and they strongly preferred ContactMap for these tasks. Analysis suggests that ContactMap’s visual interface supports rapid scanning, allowing users to quickly identify relevant contacts and information. It also affords associative reminding about important people and relations between people. We discuss the implications of these results for future communication interfaces and for theories of mediated communication. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - User- centered design; Theory and methods; Graphical user interfaces, Interaction Styles; K.4.3 [Organizational Impacts]: Computer-supported collaborative work H.4.3 [Communications Applications] Electronic mail General Terms: Design, Experimentation, Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Human-computer interaction, interpersonal communication, personal information management, personal social networks, visualization, social data mining, social reminding, iterative user-centric design, email, instant messaging. ________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. Motivation Physical workplaces are often configured so that coworkers are in close physical proximity. Many studies have documented the benefits gained from physical co-location. For example, proximity promotes social interactions and casual social encounters (Allen, 1977, Isaacs et al., 1997, Kraut et al., 1990a, Kraut et al., 1990b, Whittaker et al., 1994). As people move around their workplace, they opportunistically encounter coworkers and this can remind people about conversations they intended to engage in. This lets people discharge commitments they may otherwise have forgotten (Isaacs et al., 1997, Kraut et al., 1990a, Kraut et al., 1990b, Whittaker et al., 1994). Casual encounters also result in unplanned conversations that allow people to keep in touch and maintain social relationships (Bly et al., 1993, Dourish and Bly, 1992, Heath and Luff, 1991, Fish et al.,