A Swarm of Little Notes

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Jim Herbsleb, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says employees want IM to be more adaptable to individual privacy preferences. Formerly with Bell Labs Research in Naperville, Ill., Herbsleb and his colleagues there designed a prototype IM system that lets users control how much presence information they want to share, and with whom.

Within an office, the most common use of IM is to set up face-to-face meetings without hovering outside someone's door. But having a message pop up on your computer screen in the middle of an important activity is not pleasant either, says Sun's John Tang, who is working to make instant messaging a more courteous technology. One feature of an IM system developed by Tang and his colleagues, called Awarenex, is a contact preview — a small message box that rolls down from the top of the screen whenever the user receives an IM. "It tells you that someone's trying to IM you and shows the first line of the message," Tang says. "You can decide whether to have the conversation or not."

Awarenex also allows users to end conversations more gracefully. "When you are talking to someone face to face and they start putting their pencil away or closing their notebook," says Tang, "you know that you should start the closure process." The equivalent of that kind of body language on Awarenex is a message saying the user waves goodbye, followed by a countdown of dots diminishing in size. "That gives a signal that the person wants to end the conversation," Tang says, "but it leaves a window for you to ask one last question or make one final remark."

Feeling connected with colleagues is especially valuable for those who do a lot of traveling or work at home, says Ellen Isaacs, a free-lance user-interface designer formerly with AT&T Labs. Isaacs was part of a team at AT&T that developed Hubbub, a wireless IM system for PCs and Palm devices. It lets each user pick a little tune or distinct sound ID that is heard by everybody on his buddy list whenever he is online. "The sound ends up fading into the background," Isaacs says. "So you hear people's tunes coming and going just as you would hear co-workers walk by your office." It's not just a fun feature, she says; the tunes often trigger useful impromptu interactions. "It's like hearing colleagues chatting in the hallway and going, 'Oh, I needed to talk to so-and-so about something.'"

Isaacs believes that concerns about social time wasting on IM are overblown. She studied several thousand workplace IMs logged over 16 months and found that only 6% of the messages were exclusively personal.

At the same time, researcher Herbsleb believes the benefits of IM in business are understated. He conducted a study at Bell Labs comparing the speed of work in software-development projects, some of which used workers at different sites and some of which had all the work done at a single site. The same kind of task, Herbsleb found, took nearly 21/2 times as long when it was distributed among workers at different locations. The workers in the study, who were based in Germany, India and the United Kingdom, reported that they experienced frequent delays when they had to communicate with colleagues working in another office. They did not use instant messaging.

Or maybe they did. I'm not sure. I just called Herbsleb to check. I've left a voice mail on his cell phone. Hope he responds soon.

It's been three hours, and Herbsleb hasn't returned my call. Is he saving his daytime minutes? I should check my notes again.

Aha! Found it. No, the workers did not use instant messaging. As you can tell, I didn't either.