Should We Redesign to Support IM?
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Instant messaging (IM) on computers and text messaging on phones is now an important form of communication. It happens everywhere and often concurrently or while people are doing other things such as studying, readings, attending a class, attending a meeting at work, driving a car or watching TV. This raises an important cognitive design question:
Should we redesign experiences to better support concurrent instant messaging, and if so, what do the new experiences look like?
For example, rather than banning IM in the classroom or corporate meeting room, should we rethink these activities to directly integrate IM?
To take a cognitive approach to this question we need to understand what psychological needs IM meets and how it otherwise impacts perception, memory, thinking, learning, mood and interaction.
I’ve been collecting research on this issue for sometime and just found an interesting article in the February issue of Cyberpsychology & Behavior on Distractions, Distractions: Does Instant Messaging Affect College Students’ Performance on a Concurrent Reading Comprehension Task?
The authors found that IM while reading slows you down but does not interfere with reading comprehension unless you really do a lot of it.
