iChat and Gabber: Interfaces Investigated
One of the classes I was fortunate enough to take this semester was entitled Computer-Mediated Communication. Susan Fussell taught it. The class helped me gain a much greater understanding of the academic world which does research on the very things I’ve spent a lot of time designing outside of academia. I enjoyed the class.
The end result of the class was a paper I wrote attempting to “bridge the gap” by comparing iChat and Gabber’s interfaces with some of the Computer-Mediated Communication research problems. This paper is not as substantively supported as many of my papers, but that is in part because I did perform actual research using iChat and Gabber’s interfaces.
While I have openly criticized some aspects of iChat, I really do love it. This paper details some of the reasons that is the case. This paper can be thought of as a newer version of my article iChat Thought Bubbles, or as a version of my Interruptive Instant Messaging article which talks about other aspects of instant messaging interfaces. Those of you who have been waiting to hear more about instant messaging interfaces, this is for you. Note also that you can browse just the hci category of my blog to find similar things.
Sometime in the next month I may work to HTML-ize this paper if there’s enough demand. For the time being, I’ve posted my paper as a PDF. Feel free to comment here.
Great read, and immediately got me thinking about history and history usage. I came up with an idea for a new history interface, that could have fit rather well in the Gabber design. Since we preloaded a bit of the conversation into the chat window I thought it would be interesting to take that a bit further.
When I wanted to find a previous statement, I usually first hoped that it was in the buffer that was already loaded, and would scroll back, but often it was not. I would generally have knowledge of it being fairly recent or not and could then open up the log viewer to find it, but I had to do so by dates and read large amounts of text without immediate context. My idea was to have a link at the top of the chat scrollback to “View Previous Messages” that would immediately prepend another chunk of the log into the chat buffer. This way I stayed in context and could easily back track through conversations.
Understanding this could be tedious if the desired snippet of conversation was buried very deep, a “View Older Logs” link could also be provided that would open the larger log viewer that has larger chunks of logs (ours was by month I believe). It seemed like it would work pretty well since, as you discuss, it kept everything in the context of that current ongoing conversation, and kept more information in the immediate conversation window.
* Printed for good lunch reading.
Despite lack of interest in the other paper I posted, I’ve gone ahead and posted two more of my school papers. […]
[…] If you liked these thoughts, you should probably check out a paper I wrote on similar topics. I promise that I don’t wander off-topic as much in it. […]