It might be regarding the fact that synchronous and highly interactive communication does not necessarily imply that one won’t want to refer to it later.
Not directly in response to what you say here, but continuing my thoughts on this topic:
- Chat has the least friction, so that is where people tend to turn to by default. For me, it’s the same mechanics as what caused a lot of conversations to migrate from blogs and their comments to the socials (I unpack this in this post of mine, under “A way to look at interaction”)
- My experience on Facebook is that people easily get “stuck” in chat (because it’s ongoing, interactive, immediate) and that draws them away from the slower interaction in the group/community
- Chat is super useful to deal with a crisis or to have a real-time, live exchange on a topic where being able to adjust to feedback instantly is helpful (“let’s drop the e-mail thread and pick up the phone for this”)
- Messages are wonderful because they are a way to write something more longform (internal e-mail) to somebody, that they will read and respond to when available. In the absence of such a functionality, people “hijack” chat for that, and send “letters” through a communication channel that is made primarily for live, interactive communication (though of course it has flexibility and can also be used asynchronously). This is what happens on Facebook, or Whatsapp: every now and again you receive a message pages long, that you can’t read now, even less respond to now, but the fact it happens in the “instant messaging/chat” channel creates pressure.
- Both channels (Messages and Chat) have their uses, stemming from what makes them similar (in the case I was bringing up: I’m having “a conversation with this person” – or people) and what makes them different.
- Guiding people to one or the other is an interface issue as I see things, and not an education one.
- I don’t see the duration of history retention as a direct consequence of the differences in use cases between the two: it could be used as a tool to try and “prevent” people from overusing chat for important exchanges that shouldn’t be lost, but for me that is relying on education to solve the issue of “getting people to use the right channel for the right things”
- How do the socials design their interface to control the length of utterances/degree of interactivity on their platforms? The box for writing something on Facebook is small, so people think small. You can’t use formatting. Twitter limited length. On the other side, we have (had? who is still on?) chat spaces like IRC: just a line to write on, and a very visible collective conversation that has a certain speed. Blogging? A new post on WordPress gives me a nearly full-page space to write, with a title!
For me, this is where affordance comes in. Make people “not want” to type in paragraphs in chat, and “want” to move to chat if they’re messaging back-and-forth synchronously. (etc.)
So, aside from thinking things and pointing out what doesn’t “feel” right to me, do I have concrete suggestions? I’m honestly not sure at this stage. Let me try thinking out loud. (I thank you all again for your patience with my sometimes verbose musings.)
My concrete problem as community manager is the following: I would like to keep both chat and messages, because I think I have use cases for both. I also don’t want my community members to get sucked up in chats (or private messages for that matter), because the nature of a support community, particularly where we are dealing with lives (even if they’re “just” cat lives), is that support given in public is more likely to be subject to checks and balances and less likely to go off the rails and have serious consequences. And because I know from experience that when members are chatting away in the background, it satisfies their need for action and connection that doesn’t benefit the larger community. (OK this is drifting out of UX I think, sorry about that.)
So, I’d like to be able to have specific control about who has private message and chat privileges. I don’t want to let normal members chat with each other, but I want staff or certain groups to be able to initiate chat with members if needed. I’d like channels to be accessible on certain conditions.
Just a note: I know Discourse already does a large part of what I’m talking about in this post – I’m just trying to think using my needs as a starting point.
Same with personal messages. But maybe not the same settings. I might want people to be able to exchange personal messages but not chat. Or vice-versa.
Which brings us back to the initial question: say I have access to chat and personal messages, where do I find them and what is going to invite me to use one rather than another? For now, user cards clearly invite me to message. But right next to my avatar is a little chat bubble. So we have two different “entry points” for 1-1 communication (if we stick with that scenario). Either I “see” somebody I want to connect with directly, and I’ll send them a message. Or I think of something to say to someone, and I’m more likely to click on the chat bubble to write to them. Plus, the chat bubble overlays the chat window to what I’m currently doing instead of replacing it.
Whereas if I were to go to “My Messages” in the sidebar, I actually end up in a space that seems to be all about me: my activity, my notifications, my profile. Messages almost seem like an afterthought.
I have the feeling the way things are set up now sends some kind of “mixed message” (no pun intended) regarding how to talk to people.
So, how about grouping messages and chats in some way? Not merging, because as mentioned more than once in this conversation, they have different uses, but they also are cousins (hence my confusion when looking for something that I recall being in one or the other). I’m not sure what label would cover “Messages and Chats” well, but for me it would make sense, if I have had chats with “Rose” as well as message exchanges with her, to have a way to access them easily (metaphorically) side-by-side. I see this as a kind of “My Communication Hub” where I would see who I’ve had personal communications with (individuals or groups) and be able to access them without having to first know if it was through chat or Messages. Because my brain (and I don’t think it’s unique to me) is probably going to know who it was with before knowing if it was chat or messages. Maybe a first step in that direction would be to make the existence of a chat with somebody visible in the message view, and vice-versa.
This would definitely be helpful.
This idea I’m very ambivalent about. I feel the whole concept of “private topics” not intuitive at all. Just like, as mentioned elsewhere, the fact that these “private messages” are not private at all because either party can unilaterally expand the audience without consent of the other party, including for past exchanges.
I really like the way these messages/private topics work, however. But when it comes to labelling, they feel more like “internal e-mail” or the “direct messages” one might have encountered on message boards over the last decades.
But on second thought: sure, why not. We’d have chat (instant messaging) on one side, and private topics (but then make them properly private… I recall a discussion about “personal” instead of “private” for to my ears at least, it’s same-same – you get a letter in the post marked “personal”, that clearly implies it’s not for others). And maybe that could be grouped under Messaging.
And maybe there would be a way to “jump” from one to another (is that a “bad good idea?”, to start in chat and say “make this a topic”, or be in a topic and say “make a chat from this”? Probably a step too far, though I’m seeing this need to drift from one to the other in quite a few posts in this topic, for example:
It could be an invitation: if a topic is morphing into a near-synchronous exchange of short messages, the system could “invite to chat”, or if somebody is typing a three-page letter into the chat input field, invite to “make this a topic instead? you’ll be able to format!”?
Trying to summarize:
- as I see it both “direct messages/topics” and chat deserve to exist
- it would make sense to bring them closer “geographically”, for example under a “messages” or “direct communication” heading, which de-silos a bit and presents them more as what they are, two flavours of non-public communication
- expanding search to chat would be great (isn’t that already possible?)
- granular access rights for both chats and messages
- solution to the “private/personal topics that aren’t that personal”?
- how do we invite people to communicate? (what’s on the user card, what’s highly visible on the interface)
I’m sure a lot of this has been discussed and thought through before and that there are probably solutions to some of my issues that I don’t know of.
