Maturation of Instant Messaging: Savings, Behaviors, Social Networks, and Beliefs* Michael J. Muller, Mary Elizabeth Raven, Sandra Kogan, David R. Millen, and Kenneth Carey IBM Research / Collaborative User Experience and IBM Software Group One Rogers Street, Cambridge MA 02142 USA +1 617 693 4235
[email protected] ABSTRACT We describe the introduction of Lotus Sametime™, an instant messaging (IM) product, in an organization. This brief report analyzes the development of several aspects of user experience over a 24-month period: (1) savings in the use of other communication channels, (2) growth in messaging behaviors, (3) change in messaging partners, and (4) beliefs about the value of the product. Although IM is a simple “walk-up-and-use” product, users show subtle development in skills over an extended period. Keywords Instant messaging, Chat, Synchronous communication INTRODUCTION What happens when people begin to use a simple communication product? How quickly does their use make a measurable difference? How do their skills mature? We studied these questions during a 24-month introduction of Sametime, IBM’s instant messaging (IM) product, in an IBM organization. Sametime offers a suite of services, including synchronous meetings, application-sharing, and an application programmer interface that can be used by other services. This paper deals only with the Sametime Chat client, which provides a user-constructed list of frequent IM partners, the ability to exchange text chats with those partners, and awareness indicators of which of those partners is currently online. In partnership with the sponsoring organization, we conducted survey-based self-report research into people’s use of Sametime during a 24-month period. Individual users began using the product on different dates. We were thus able to administer the survey to 283 people in five cohorts of experience with the IM product: 1-3 months (n=10), 4-6 months (n=33), 6-12 months (n=74), 12-18 months (n=59), and more than 18 months (n=107). We note that we did not survey the same individuals on five different occasions. Rather, we surveyed different groups of individuals at five different levels of experience. This approach is has risks, because
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To appear in Proceedings of CSCW’2002 (New Orleans LA USA, November 2002). New York: ACM (interactive poster).
different experience levels might have been linked to other, unmeasured differences among the groups. However, demographic data did not suggest group differences. RESULTS Savings in other Communication Channels One of the crucial claims of IM products is that they reduce the usage of other, non-IM communication channels. We began our analysis by testing this simple claim, grouping all 283 respondents into a single sample. Respondents used a seven-point scale to indicate whether their use of other communication channels had increased, decreased, or remained the same following their adoption of IM (not shown in Figure 1). Using the one-sample Z-test, we found reliable decreases in the use of each of the six channels that we asked about: Email (Z=-11.05, p
