Instant messaging: Effects of relevance and timing

Journal of Computer-Mediated …, 2007

Instant messaging (IM) is one of the newest and fastest-growing communication technologies in the workplace today, yet little is known about its real implications for worker productivity. We have taken the particular affordances of instant messaging as the basis for extrapolating from and linking prior studies of email use, polychronic communication, and task interruptions to develop propositions regarding the unanticipated individual-level productivity implications of widespread IM use in the workplace. We argue that while instant message communication may accelerate particular tasks and decision processes, unstructured IM use will likely contribute to erosion in individuals' overall productivity due to an increase in users' communicative workloads, engagement in polychronic communication, and an increase in the frequency of interruptions. We intend our proposed model and propositions as an impetus for further study of both the benefits and challenges of workplace instant messaging.

Our research explores how interruptive notifications support task management in a desktop environment. We conducted two user studies with a community of open source software users and developers to explore their experience with interruptive notifications. We found that certain kinds of notifications support multitasking, task prioritization, task management, as well as influence task disruption management. We discuss how these behaviors affect the notification-task management user experience and offer design guidelines derived from these results to inform better design of systems that interrupt through notification.

2011

Abstract Instant messaging (IM) technologies are being rapidly deployed in the workplace. Current studies largely focus on the adoption of IM and how IM is used. Little research has been conducted to understand the potential impact of using IM in the workplace.

2016 Joint 8th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS) and 17th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems (ISIS), 2016

Spontaneous communication is an integral part of any workplace as well as everyday life. Most of the spontaneous communications happen over email or chat applications in workplaces that use computer technologies. Frequent use of chat application or email hampers the recipient's workflow and leads to constant interruptions causing task fragmentation. In this paper, we present a receiver oriented interruptioninformation management framework using automated agents to prevent receivers from a plethora of messages. This framework manages both the interruption and upcoming information in the chat interface. This study is a novel approach in the area of interruption management, which not only considers interruption management but also processes information based on users' behavior and preferences. This framework is a cooperative approach where both the message sender and the receiver work together to deliver messages during favorable times. The receiver contributes to manage interruption whereas the sender helps to manage information, together forming an interruption-information management mechanism for deciding the least interruptible time for message delivery. The study shows that users become comparatively more productivity and complete more task with the relatively short amount of time while using the interruption-information management chat interface than conventional chat.

International Journal of Human- …, 2003

In this special issue, we will focus on the nature of interruptions such as messaging while computing and how to optimize the user experience.

Measurement of workload is a critical element of any research involving operator tasking in complex systems. One common method of measuring workload is through secondary tasking, which requires a subject to use spare mental capacity to attend to secondary tasking. Traditional secondary tasking testing can be intrusive and introduce an unrealistic artifact. However, embedded secondary tasks do not fundamentally change the task or task performance. This paper will discuss the use of a chat interface, resembling that of popular instant messaging programs, as an embedded secondary tasking measurement tool in the testing of supervisory control performance for monitoring and control of Tactical Tomahawk missiles. The use of the embedded chat tool to induce information-seeking secondary tasks yielded critical results needed for determination of operator workload. However one drawback discovered is that some subjects treated incoming instant messages as the primary task instead of the secon...

2005

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.

Proceedings of the …, 2002

Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover, people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range of topics via many fastpaced interactions per day, each with many short turns and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007

We present results from a field study investigating the influence of conversations on the multitasking behavior of computer users. We report on several findings, including the timing of the resumption of tasks following conversational interruptions and on the nature and rate of computing activities that are performed concurrently with conversation.