Abstract
How much history of the dialogue should a chat client include? Some chat clients have minimized the dialogue history to deploy the space for other purposes. A theory of conversational coordination suggests that stripping away history raises the cost of conversational grounding, creating problems for both writers and readers. To test this proposition and inform design, we conducted an experiment in which one person instructed another on how to solve a simple puzzle. Participants had chat clients that showed either a single conversational turn or six of them. Having the dialogue history helped collaborators communicate efficiently and led to faster and better task performance. The dialogue history was most useful when the puzzles were more linguistically complex and when instructors could not see the work area. We present evidence of participants adapting their discourse to partially compensate for deficits in the communication media.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, CHI 2004 |
| Pages | 431-438 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| State | Published - Oct 1 2004 |
| Event | 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, CHI 2004 - Vienna, Austria Duration: Apr 24 2004 → Apr 29 2004 |
Other
| Other | 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, CHI 2004 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | Austria |
| City | Vienna |
| Period | 4/24/04 → 4/29/04 |
Keywords
- Communication
- Computer-mediated communication
- Empirical studies
- Language
- Persistence
- Shared visual space
- Text chat
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design