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Title

Supporting awareness in instant messaging: an empirical study and mechanism design

Author(s)

Tran, Minh Hong;  Yang, Yun;  Raikundalia, Gitesh K.

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-to-moment 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.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies

Source

Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (OZCHI 2005), Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 21-25 November 2005

Publication year

2005

Keyword(s)

Awareness;  Instant Messaging;  Chat Tools;  Design;  Empirical Study

Publisher

Computer Human Interaction Special Interest Group

ISBN

1595932224

Publisher URL

http://www.ozchi.org/2005/index.php?id=accepted-long

Copyright

Copyright © 2005 the authors and CHISIG. Published version of this paper reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher.

Full text

Peer reviewed