By Hugh North (opens in new tab) and Carolyn Bufford-Funk, PhD (opens in new tab)
Image credit: iStock
We recently completed a body of research to understand extreme usage among enterprise technology users. Using multiple techniques and studies, we wanted to delve into the experience of very heavy users, or high intensity users, to understand not just how humans experience the technology, but also to learn how specific or universal are the pain points they experience.
In a typical week, a high intensity enterprise technology user will send hundreds of emails and messages; open at least 16 documents, spreadsheets, and/or presentations; and edit or create at least 5 documents, spreadsheets, and/or presentations. High intensity certainly describes not just the volume of tools, documents, and applications they’re working with on a daily basis. While their pain points and challenges mirror those of other information workers (opens in new tab), high intensity also describes the impact felt as a result of experiencing those pain points and challenges at a high volume.
A complex ecosystem
We began by looking at email and instant messaging, but quickly realized that the network of tools used is much more diverse and complex: phone calls, video calls, and sometimes internal social media (such as Yammer) were part of the equation. And all these media apply to life outside work, further complicating the picture, as users switch between work and personal communications throughout the day.
Similar to what our colleagues saw with very small business owners (opens in new tab), these users typically have multiple devices: a laptop or desktop computer, one or more mobile phones, and often a tablet and/or other devices such as gaming consoles and smart speakers. They also frequently have multiple work and personal accounts for email, messaging, video chat, and/or social media.
During work, most of this group monitors their communications with notifications, and they check their communications frequently. They also keep up with work communications outside of work with notifications and by checking frequently for updates. This contributes to a great deal of stress, as communications and notifications come through with equal urgency, leading users to feel pressured to be “always on” and consistently on top of all communications regardless of their relative importance.
Compartmentalizing and migrating communications
Users receive their many communications through a variety channels, including email, messaging and phone calls and video chat/meetings (consistent with information workers’ channels). To compensate for this, they develop mental models of what kinds of communications they send and receive via each channel. For example:
- Phone calls are for highly urgent communication.
- Email tends to be longer, slower, and more external-facing than messaging. Email is also preferred for documenting important communications.
- Video chat/conferencing is used for interactive work, such as collaboration and persuasion.
Conversations often shift between different forms of communication. For example, a conversation might begin as an instant message, but change to a video call, or alternate between email and phone calls. People switched communications modes for two reasons:
- To get onto a channel that worked better for their conversation, or
- When no single channel can meet all of their needs, e.g. when they need to urgently request changes by phone and follow up with email to document the changes.
Triaging communications by importance
Past research with information workers suggested that people are either triagers who end up ignoring or deleting many communications, or ‘zero inboxers’ who insist on dealing with all communications. All the users in our study triage communications. Then after triaging, some people choose to deal with all communications (go for inbox zero), while other people ignore or delete low-priority communications.
The approach to triage uses a variety of signals of importance, such as sender, channel, topic, and urgency. For example, when the sender is your boss (or your boss’ boss), it is important, and when you get a phone call it is both urgent and important. These are strong signals that win when they compete with weaker signals like topic or even urgency.
Shifting from one communication channel to another is also a signal of importance, typically of fairly high importance. It is worth the effort of migrating a conversation when it is important.
Amidst all this activity, high intensity users struggle not to miss important communications across channels. They also struggle to identify important communications, even with their sophisticated mental models, because the signals are not always immediately evident.
Shifting between channels also poses difficulty because the context can be lost in the switch. When other priorities intrude, such as a high volume of meetings, a heavy project load, or a backlog after having been away particularly meeting-heavy days, keeping up with their extremely high volume of communications is particularly challenging.
There is a certain irony in having both a rich variety of communication tools at our disposal and a feeling that even with those aids, we aren’t more efficient or effective in the communications we conduct every day. Technology can reduce the strain, but tools that attempt to help users manage their communications will need to consider how to aggregate multiple channels and identities, track communications across channels, and assign levels of priority that reflect the users’ mental models.
What do you think? If you are an enterprise user, do you consider yourself high intensity after reading this? How can technology help ease the burdens of your workload? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.
Hugh North is an experienced leader with product planning, user research, marketing, advertising, marketing research, and data + insight driven strategy development experience in global commercial and consumer settings. He builds and leads research teams. From large to small organizations, with experience helping create and sell technology products and services across a wide range of industries, Hugh brings a different and insightful approach to research and insight generation to inform decision making.
Carolyn Bufford-Funk is a mixed-methods researcher (expert in quantitative) and designer with 9+ years of experience designing, coding, executing, analyzing, and communicating research to diverse audiences. I identify research questions, innovate methods and measures to solve complex problems, and use qualitative data analyses and statistics to distill actionable insights from data. She is especially interested in complex spaces and processes, including e-learning and edtech, healthcare, government, working at scale, behavior change design, and growth design.