Conversational Awareness in Text-Based Computer Mediated Communication

Abstract

Text-based computer-mediated communication (TxtCMC) supports an instant exchange of messages among geographically distributed people. TxtCMC, such as Instant Messaging and chat tools, has increasingly become widespread and popular at home and at work. Supporting conversational awareness is an important aspect of TxtCMC. Conversational awareness provides a user with information about the presence and activity of others, and therefore helps to establish a context for the user’s own activity. Unfortunately, current interface design of TxtCMC provides inadequate support for conversational awareness, especially in support for awareness of turn-taking, conversational context and multiple concurrent conversations. This research aims to address these three issues by (1) conducting an empirical study to identify the user need for conversational awareness and (2) designing an interface to support this type of awareness. This chapter presents two innovative prototypes, namely Relaxed Instant Messenger (RIM) and Conversational Dock (ConDock). RIM integrates a sequential interface with an adaptive threaded interface to support awareness of turn-taking and conversational context. ConDock adopts a focus + context visualisation technique to support awareness of multiple conversations. The evaluations of the two prototypes show that they meet their design objectives and were found useful in enhancing group communication.