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Integrative Example
Published in Anne McLaughlin, Richard Pak, Designing Displays for Older Adults, 2020
As the emergent themes section foretold, the conceptual differences between chat and email might pose some problems for an older user who is not familiar with chat-based collaboration software. These problems are exacerbated by more conventional usability problems (visibility, conspicuity). Foremost, the fusion of email, chat, and file sharing is confusing for Mabel because she is not used to such frequent and terse messages that chat provides. She dreads opening the app to find scattered updates in various channels, direct message threads, and threads of other messages. She finds it hard to focus and then move her attention to so many disparate information sources. The brevity of messages, some only a few words, also makes it hard to follow what is going on. In the old days, Mabel was able to compose email that contained a few important points and had an explicit subject line. She found that this facilitated later searching and organizing. However, the endless stream of texts is highly frustrating for Mabel as she now has to remember specific words or phrases of what she wants to search. Quite often, the search is fruitless because most of the results seem to be irrelevant chatter. In addition, although the task of sharing a file with a few team members may not seem overly complicated from the task analysis, the steps and their order are different enough from email that they cause her to pause. First, there are terminology differences that Mabel must learn. Direct messages, as the name implies, are different from chat messages. Mabel has learned that a direct message (or DM) is similar to email. Even after understanding this terminology difference, direct messages are treated similar to chats in channels – they are simply private chats between select recipients. Mabel wonders how direct messages between groups of people are different from “channels,” so she struggles with when to use one versus another. To compound the problem, the app confusingly mixes metaphors by using the phrase “open a direct message” when the user carries out actions to send a new direct message. The confusing terminology seems to be a symptom of an app that was developed quickly, organically, and ad hoc, without a strong initial vision.
How social instant messaging questions affect replies: a randomised controlled experiment
Published in Behaviour & Information Technology, 2021
Ying Tang, Khe Foon Hew, Xinyue Yuan, Chen Qiao
A more recent way of information seeking is through private instant messaging questions via SNSs, which we term here as a social instant messaging (SIM) search. Popular SNSs, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, now allow users to send private messages to contacts or strangers. SIM allows users to contact someone one-on-one without necessarily knowing their email address or contact number. For example, on Facebook’s front page, users can find a list of contacts in the lower-right corner and can simply click on someone’s name to start a private conversation. Twitter users can send direct messages to others as long as the targets do not block private message reception.