Online Everywhere : Evolving Mobile Instant Messaging Practices { anonymized

In this paper we report on the results of a large scale user survey investigating the status setting and interruption management behavior of mobile instant messaging (IM) users with existing systems. The motivation for this study was to inform the design of interface tools that support users by setting contextually appropriate awareness messages. Our results demonstrate that many desktop IM practices have been appropriated by mobile users, but in the face of increasingly situated computer usage and an “always online” culture, several frictions are emerging between desktop and mobile practices. We find that common assumptions about IM users and the established awareness cues are failing and users are frequently embarrassed and interrupted with negative and sometimes threatening consequences. INTRODUCTION AND RELATED WORK Instant Messaging (IM) systems support synchronous communication over technology mediated channels. Users maintain a “buddy list” of other users with whom they can initiate a real-time text conversation by clicking on the buddy’s name (or other representation). When users type a message, their buddies’ computer displays pop-up windows containing the text of the messages and a place to respond. To support awareness of buddy status, buddy lists are often augmented with two types of real-time status cues: first, a simple indication of whether the buddy is “offline”, “away”, “idle”, “busy”, or simply “online”. The second type of cue is a short custom phrase that users can choose to broadcast to all of their buddies. Different implementations, extensions, and services often modify aspects of this basic framework. IM is not the first example of a system that provides awareness cues. Similar systems have been providing insight into the physical context of distributed communities of practice [16] since at least 1971 [15]. Early examples include the Unix command, “who”, which allowed users to see whether other users on the same mainframe computer were typing. As individuals began to work on smaller more personal networked computers, utilities like “finger” emerged to reveal remote U/I activity and custom “project status”. Greater bandwidth and access to advanced peripherals enabled richer remote awareness through systems like MediaSpaces [3] and Portholes [6]. In the physical world a popular office awareness system is the “in/out” board. Such a bulletin board is maintained at a common location, like a reception area, to give people in small to medium sized office suites knowledge of where the inhabitants are. Some researchers have attempted to create a hybrid ecology around these boards so that the benefits of digital awareness, such as remote automatic updating can benefit from the physical placement of the bulletin board itself [12, 9, 5]. More recently researchers have custom built special systems to explore the effects of awareness cues in a mobile context. The Awarenex system examined the user interface of mobile awareness cues [14]. Another system, PePe [11], examined how users described the locations that they visited. In the commercial arena microblogging services such as Twitter [2] and Jaiku [1] have been developed to support user entered status from mobile devices. Other researchers have focused on evaluating the role of IM status cues in existing IM systems. They have used a number of perspectives including focussing on IM’s social role among teens [7], how it functions in physically distributed workplace teams [8], and how it maintains social connections in the workplace [13]. In this paper, we focused on evaluating the role of status cues as they relate to mobility, the ensuing inappropriate interruptions that result and the resulting status management behavior of these users. Our motivation is to inform the design of {anonymized system}which has the goal of enabling users to quickly and accurately enter appropriate contextual status messages in IM. This paper contributes to the state of the art by adding to our understanding of evolving practices of mobile communication management by surveying a large number (N = 447) of mobile IM users who are actively using existing systems in their daily lives. Through this approach we are able to avoid effects due to system novelty, and small numbers of participants.