Hi my name is Joshua Hailpern
and today I'm going to be presenting
research that I conducted when I was a
research scientist at hp labs
in conjunction with mark huber and
ronald calvo
our paper is entitled how impactful is
the presentation in email
the effect of avatar and signatures but
given the fact that in 10 minutes I
really can't go into all the details
and all the fun parts that we've
discovered
conducting this research instead I'm
really thinking of this paper as
click baby conclusions on how to annoy
people with your email
avatars and signatures so
the main part of this research was
focused on understanding
the avatars those little pictures of
yourself
or maybe your kids in the top corners of
emails that
are of the sender and the signature that
the sender has at the end of the email
and what we really wanted to understand
in this work was
how the recipient perceives the sender
if the avatar changes or if the
signature signature
changes as well so what does the
recipient
think of the sender
and what we discovered is there's a lot
of downsides here
most avatars make you appear less
agreeable less extroverted
more neurotic and even makes the email
content itself appear less professional
and less well-formatted
whereas most of the signatures make you
appear less
agreeable less extroverted less open and
makes your email appear less well
formatted
but it isn't just all downsides
out of interest a normal picture of
yourself like a very professional
looking photo makes you appear more
conscientious
whimsical pictures of yourself make you
appear conscientious and open
and if you have the company logo in your
signature you'll also appear more open
and lots of social media links like a
skype
facebook link or twitter would make you
appear conscientious
and make your email uh appear more
professional
but even these upsides have some
downsides too
right so these normal pictures of
yourself make you appear less
extroverted
less open and makes your email appear
less well-formatted
for example having your company logo
there while it makes you appear less
open you also appear
less extroverted so
we also saw this really other
interesting observation
which is that numerous of these changes
in the avatar or in the signature
also impacted the perception of the
content of the email
even though the content of the email was
something that we deeply controlled
so we're wondering if there isn't some
kind of halo effect going on here
if it isn't that first impressions issue
that we all talk about right
is the first impression that you're
having of
the sender changing how you perceive
everything that comes after that which
is the body copy of the email itself
so some of the conclusions that we
presented in the paper included that
these social cues of the avatar and the
signature things that we are hoping is
going to be informative and make a good
impression
often send negative signals and even if
there are positive signals being sent
they come along with negative baggage so
therefore if you
must keep your avatar and signatures
simple
and if you're designing software go easy
on the avatars and the profile
information we're not saying don't have
them
but make sure that you really understand
the impact because even these small
subtle changes can have a noticeable
impact on people's perception
now in the remaining time that I have on
this uh
recording of this presentation I
would like to briefly discuss how we
reach these conclusions and these
observations
from the quantitative data we collected
so initially we started with an informal
qualitative interviews
with about uh 15 participants
what we really wanted to do is
understand what they thought about
emails in particular
avatars and signatures ended up being
very interesting in terms of how many
opinions that they actually had
this led us to conduct a between subject
quantitative mechanical turk study with
900 participants
our goal of this study as we alluded to
earlier was to
measure the perception of the sender
from the recipient
and we did this uh changing on the
avatars
and changing the signatures and it was
really kind of running two studies
at the same time right we didn't
actually try to chew a manipulation of
the avatar and the signature at the same
time we did them completely
independently
now how did we measure the impact well
uh the first five metrics that we used
were the
the metrics that get extracted from the
bfi personality test
and this was a really useful uh measure
for a
set of measures for us to pull from
because the bfi has been used
to measure some of the perceived
personality
of someone else so multiple times so
this was a really great
uh set of measures for us to use
we also added in four additional metro
measures
about the email quality itself this
included
how easy it was to read the formatting
how professional and how well written it
was
we also conducted these two
experiments basically side by side
the segment signature and the avatar
experiment all of our participants only
participated in
either a signature condition or an
avatar addiction or I guess technically
a control condition as well
none of the variations were included in
both situations
so in effect we were basically this
paper has two
independent uh studies running at the
same time
now one of the most important things
here were
were the controls that we had in place
because
we knew that the email content itself
could greatly impact the recipient's
perception
so to mitigate that as much as possible
we had
six different variations of email
content for all of the different
conditions of this experiment
we pulled the four of these from the
berkeley enron data set where they
actually assigned
tone to the different emails so we had a
bunch of different
tones of email content from that enron
corpus
to ensure that something that might have
been really aggressive in one email
would be counter balanced by one
that was not aggressive in another
condition we also found one
tone neutral email from the enron corpus
and then we included
lastly a lorem ipsum body content as
well
just to round this out so in effect we
wanted to make sure
that the results that we saw in terms of
the impact of avatar and signature
had no relationship or as minimal
relationship as possible
to the content of the email itself
this also let us test because we
controlled for the email content
what these uh
subtle secondary uh display uh
elements of the avatar and the signature
did to the content of the email
in terms of how the quality of the email
was perceived
so what did this result in we had nine
dependent measures against six avatar
conditions
we had nine dependent measures against
six signature conditions now
we chose six but obviously there could
be a lot more variations and we actually
suggest that
future work be done diving into
multiple different types of avatars and
really trying to tease out what's going
on there
or different types of signatures and
we only were really examining how these
variations
related to the control condition
basically were they
more or less agreeable than a control
so we never actually tested whether or
not one type of avatar was more or less
agreeable than another
so likewise we also never ran an anova
because
these were a series of independent
t-tests in addition in our paper
we reported significance at 0.05
0.01 and 0.001 we do this because
we are strong believers in transparency
in terms of significance and showing
significance levels at these multiple
gradations
allows a great deal of transparency
we also have read a lot of literature
about repeated measures and changing
the the significance threshold for that
we tend to air
towards the more transparent approach
but
if you did want to adjust for that in
the paper we do report the scidac
correction
which put the p-value at 0.007 and so
all of that is included in the paper as
well
one of the things that I think we did
really successfully in the paper is how
we presented the results
as you can see here and this is a
screenshot of some of the tables that we
actually had
is for in this in this case it was for
the avatars
we actually showed with these sparklines
what the mean
and standard deviation for each of the
measures are and we highlighted those
that were statistically significant
versus the control
in in red as a red dot instead of a
black dot
which from our perspective made it
really easy for us to see what the
impact was
where the significance was and make it
uh
really compelling and easy to understand
what the results that we found were and
that's a summary of how impactful is
presentation in email
I encourage everyone to look at our
paper there's a huge amount of data
that we included there including a
series of appendices
so thank you very much and I hope you
enjoy the rest of the conference