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Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

2009-12-20 07:54:40
Dave CROCKER wrote:


On 12/17/2009 12:06 PM, Seth wrote:
We don't know that it _will_ be the worst case.  To the extent there
are _some_ users who can tell the difference (and the admin can tell
the difference between them and other users), having two buttons gives
better information.


unless there are _some_ users who are more confused by the choice. UI complexity is not reduced by having more buttons; reducing complexity leads to better UI, particularly for the mass market.

as nathaniel notes, these types of design choices for UI design require testings.

I strongly agree.

Quoting a research paper from Gordon Cormack [1] :

"When explicitly asked to classify messages, human subjects have been reported to exhibit error rates of 3%-7% [30, 16]. Tacitly derived labels, such as those obtained from a “report spam” button, where it is assumed that unreported messages are ham, may have even higher rates."

The references 30 and 16 in this paper comes from experiments with real data and real subjects (SpamOrHam - Graham-Cumming and Hotmail - Yih/Kolcz)

These error rates are most of the time bigger than what can be achieved by spam filters. So it's probably a bad idea to consider that user feedback is reliable. User interface shall be as simple as possible.

[1] Cormack, G. V. and Kolcz, A. 2009. Spam filter evaluation with imprecise ground truth. In Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in information Retrieval (Boston, MA, USA, July 19 - 23, 2009). SIGIR '09. ACM, New York, NY, 604-611. http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/cormacksigir09-spam.pdf

JM


for folks who do serious UX work, they do not guarantee that their suggestions are right, merely that they are worth testing.

d/


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 Jose Marcio MARTINS DA CRUZ           http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr
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