Supporting awareness in Instant Messaging : an empirical study and mechanism design

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Tran, Minh Hong, Yang, Yun and Raikundalia, Gitesh K (2005) Supporting awareness in Instant Messaging : an empirical study and mechanism design. In: OZCHI 2005, 23 - 25 Nov 2005, Canberra, Australia.

Abstract

Supporting awareness plays a prominent role in facilitating natural and effective communication in Instant Messaging (IM). This paper reports our empirical study of awareness in IM, using an online survey and face-to-face interviews to identify user needs for awareness support. The study has identified three themes, including awareness of multiple concurrent conversations, presence awareness of a group conversation, and visibility of moment-tomoment listeners and viewers. The study showed that these three types of awareness are necessary but have been either ineffectively supported or ignored by current IM systems. Drawing on these findings, we have designed three awareness features to support these three categories of awareness. Conversation Dock provides awareness of multiple conversations; Group List provides presence awareness in a group chat by showing who are no longer in the group chat and who are going to join the chat; and Track View provides awareness of in-progress listeners in voice conversations and in-progress viewers in video conversations.

Additional Information

Annual conference of the Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group

Item type Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
URI https://vuir.vu.edu.au/id/eprint/560
Official URL http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1108368.1108401&...
ISBN 9781595932228
Subjects Historical > RFCD Classification > 280000 Information, Computing and Communication Sciences
Historical > FOR Classification > 0805 Distributed Computing
Historical > Faculty/School/Research Centre/Department > School of Engineering and Science
Keywords instant messaging ; chat tools ; mechanism design ; computer communication
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