Some problems with text chats

Even if chat and instant messaging programs are popular, there are some issues that limit their utility especially if they are used for group meetings or complex discussions. Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter introduce in their paper five main problems with text chat.

1) Lack of links between people and what they say
It can be hard to differentiate persons and their messages particularly if there are many speakers in same chat room. It has been tried to solve this problem for example by using different color or font for each participant.

2) No visibility of listening-in-progress
It is not possible to know if other participant is listening in text chat or when that is exactly happening. Even though I think that for example the states available/away could tell something if somebody is listening or not, but in reality that doesn’t tell anything about that. Somebody can be available and same time away from the computer and the other participants can’t know that.

3) Lack of visibility of turns-in-progress
In chats, it is not always visible who is writing currently a message. The turns are transmitted when user has pressed enter-key. I think it is very important to have some visual cue of someone’s writing process for helping to take turns at right moment. Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter mention that “[name] is typing a message” at the bottom of the window of Messenger doesn’t solve the problem, because other users can’t see exactly what others are writing until the enter-key is pressed. In group meetings that could be useful to see what someone else is writing, or at least to know if someone is writing anything. But on the other hand I think it is enough information to know “[name] is typing a message”, because one good side of text chats is that there is time to think and edit the answer if user wants that.

4) Lack of control over turn positioning
If there are many participants in same chat room, the links between turns and replies are easily mixed. This problem comes even bigger, if there is lack of visibility of turns-in-progress. In my opinion this is one of the biggest problems when using chats for group meeting purposes and it is difficult to follow conversation if others are speaking same time about one subject and others about something else.

5) Lack of useful recordings and social context
Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter describe in their paper that in many chat rooms their content and discussions are not recorded. There is no history about conversations; also if there are history logs used, they are missing many times timing cues. I think it is very important that chat has a log and it is possible to return to that information later.

References:
[Smith, Cadiz & Burkhalter, 2000] Marc Smith, J.J. Cadiz and Byron Burkhalter, Conversation trees and threaded chats. Proc. CSCW 2000, 97-105.