Facemail: Showing Faces of Recipients to Prevent Misdirected Email
July 20, 2007 by Richard Conlanhttp://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2007/proceedings/p122_lieberman.pdf
This study explored user errors related to e-mail, specifically focusing on “Reply All” or unexpected “Reply To” headers sending responses back to the list. The consequences are usually just embarrassing, but can be serious. The researchers suggest that even if digitally signed and sealed email becomes widely used, people will still make these errors. The proposed solution is to display an image of each intended recipient rather than just recipient e-mail addresses.
The study used an extension of Gmail that displays the accompanying recipient photo as an e-mail address is entered. When the system doesn’t yet have a cached image it searches Google Images, Facebook, etc., to find an image for the e-mail. The interface makes a very apparent difference between clicking “Reply” and clicking “Reply All”. The interface was designed to be obvious at a glance, automatic, and scalable. Facemail is implemented as a Firefox extension, and was used in a “glanceability” study with 84 subjects asked to answer who an e-mail was going to and how many people it was going to after seeing a flash of the mail composition window. At 1 second Facemail did about as well as normal e-mail address displays, but as the time reduced down the benefit of Facemail became increasingly apparent.
Some risks of this technology are that it may make spoofed addresses more credible, makes message recipients more visible to shoulder-surfing, and may make it harder to lurk on mailing list. Some common errors that Facemail does not address are the potential dangers of public archiving of e-mail, getting the recipient right but sending too much information, and information disclosure outside of e-mail.
July 20th, 2007 at 05:56
The study was done on MIT’s webmail, not Gmail.