Motivation  -- The objective of this paper is to understand the different components of the professionals' experience of email.    Research approach  -- Twenty-five interviews (inspired by "explicitation" and "autoconfrontation" techniques) have been made with employees of a same company in order to identify the affects elicited by email usage and the representations of users about email.    Findings/Design  -- One consequence of email is that professionals perceive the work activity as more difficult to control (a source of overload and constraints). Email is also perceived as a communicative "space" where social and communicative rules are violated. Finally, email is seen as a device requiring specific skills which are not acquired.    Research limitations/Implications  -- Affects elicited by the professionals are most often negative but this result is perhaps due to the limits of the method.    Originality/Value  -- The research makes a contribution to the field of User Experience (UX).    Take away message  -- This study reveals that one important factor of professionals' negative experience of email is the lack of a shared representation about social rules in email exchanges.
['Nadia Gauducheau']
Electronic mail usage at work: an analysis of the users' representations and affects