Summary
The “Chat Circle Series” is about how to design chat interfaces, and what people like about them. It mentions an interesting point in the idea that in purely text based discussion, a listener plays no part. You have to participate in order to influence the conversation in any way. The “Chat Circle Series” references a series of iterations of a chat room the researchers have been working on, with the idea that it starts as a simple set of “chat circles” and they add features as they believe those features enrich the chat experience. Users in the circles must move around in order to speak to other circles of people, meant to simulate you being a part of a conversation. As well, without being in a circle the user cannot read those messages being sent. They then go on to explain how each given element that they chose to look at, listed below, relates to the overall whole. They found for example, that pretty bright colors n a black background for each circle worked quite well, but only if the site had a large number of people using it at any given time. When a small number of people were using it, the background went from a good contrast to sparse and bleak. They then talk about a project called TeleDirection and finally conclude the paper with a blurb about further study topics.
Reflection
The idea of involving listeners in conversation online is useful, albeit difficult one. Twitter or Pinterest are perhaps at the very least decent examples of sites which manage this. You can re-tweet or pin something which you like, meaning it becomes more heavily disseminated into the world. Its important that the researchers started with a long list of different areas to focus on in their work. They chose Environment, the Communication Channel, the Individuals Representation, History, Movement, and Context as their categories for focus. The movement category also proved interesting. The big question was how you can make something which is fairly static, just text and messages with a few pictures mixed in, feel alive and moving. As well I found it odd that people’s ideas of personal space actually translated into the circle chats. Not that I don’t believe them, just that its interesting that your views on how close is too close, or how far away is uncaring translate to a bunch of circles you chat in.
Questions
When designing a Social Media site or addon, what are some of the important focus areas? What do you think were the focus areas of some of the more major ones, Facebook or Twitter for example?
How might you create a chat function that better emulated real conversation than basic messaging?
How does what you use to represent you online (avatars or photos) change other’s opinions of you?
