IM waiting: timing and responsiveness in semi-synchronous communication

Responsiveness, or the time until a person responds to communication, can affect the dynamics of a conversation as well as participants' perceptions of one another. In this paper, we present a careful examination of responsiveness to instant messaging communication, showing, for example, that work-fragmentation significantly correlates with faster responsiveness. We show also that the presentation of the incoming communication significantly affects responsiveness (even more so than indicators that the communication was ongoing), suggesting the potential for dynamically influencing responsiveness. This work contributes to a better understanding of computer-mediated communication and to the design of new tools for computer-mediated communication.

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