Managing long term communications: Conversation and contact management

Contact management is an important part of everyday work. People exchange business cards to try to enter each other's contact lists. Local businesses provide refrigerator magnets and calendars so they will be called on when a particular need arises. People who use the telephone extensively are selective about who they add to their speed dial lists. Contact management and conversation management are linked. Many busy professionals discourage voice calls and messages, because E-mail enables them to better manage their time, conversations, and contacts. People also spend large amounts of time transcribing voice mail, browsing E-mail archives and writing todo lists - all of these activities are intended to help track the content and status of outstanding conversations. Together, these practices reveal some of the complexities of contact and conversation management. We investigated contact and conversation management by carrying out twenty semi-structured interviews with professionals in assorted fields. Key properties of technologically-mediated conversations identified were: (1) they are extended in time, which means (2) people typically engage in multiple concurrent conversations, and (3) conversations often involve multiple participants. These properties led to a significant memory load for our informants: they spoke of the difficulty of keeping tracking of conversational content and status, as well as the identity, contact information, and expertise of their conversational partners. People respond to these problems by trying to make key aspects of their conversations persistent; however, with current support tools, this strategy meets with mixed success. Building on the findings of our study, we present a new support tool that aids in managing contacts and conversation status.