Survey Report on The Use of Instant Messengers

Instant messenger is a tool that allows people to do synchronous communication between each other. Nowadays most applications provide functionalities like file transfer, video chat, audio chat, offline messaging, offline appearance and buddy list Instant Messenger’s start to be popular in middle 90’s and starts to have more time in people daily and business life every day and a recent study says that there are about 12 billion instant messages sent everyday As the usage of IM started to become more popular in people daily life, wanted to investigate the on people’s usage, preferences and problems of IM. The purpose of this study to find out the users influences in usage of IM. In Technologic Acceptance Model, the key constructs are considered for technology adaptation as Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use. The first aspect is the use of IM, including the activities people do with IM, the routines they use it, and collaboration. The second aspect is peoples’ preferences, including people’s perceived benefits of the application, problems they encounter, and ways in which they handle the problems. This study uses surveys as an evaluation method. The surveys are consisted of a consent form, demographic information part, and the questions part. Moreover, the surveys, which are created and launched by Surveys, are conducted online. There are several studies where the parameters that effect IM usage investigated. This study not only focuses on age and gender but also focus on the usage and the preferences of the people.

A survey was used to conduct this evaluation. A survey can be defined as a set of questions to which an individual is asked to respond to. Compared to methods like ethnography the data collected in surveys is not as in depth but the strengths of surveys is the ease of collecting large amount of responses from a population with no geographical boundaries. It is also a great tool to generate statistical estimates and hypothesis. Different types of surveys are actually composed of several research techniques, developed by a variety of disciplines. For instance, interview began as a tool primarily for psychologists and anthropologists, while sampling got its start in the field of agricultural economics. Survey research does not belong to any one field and it can be employed by almost any discipline. In HCI surveys are a useful tool to analyze user behavior Surveys were our chosen because of its ease in collecting data from a big number of users at a relatively low cost. Surveys can be used to easily get a very big number of responses very quickly from respondents regardless of their location. Allowing us to getting very quick opinion about how individuals can interact with technology. Surveys are also very good for doing statistical analysis.

To ensure that we had a fair amount of responses from different subsets of the user population of IM applications after defining the goal of the survey, what we did next was to develop the survey tool. We had to develop very well written, nonbiased questions. We decided to use a combination of closed ended with ordered response and open ended questions to get both qualitative and quantitative data this was very useful in getting qualitative data and gave flexibility for the respondents to give unrestricted answers. We carefully worded this to allow the answers have some form of pattern that can be used for good data analysis Combinations of the two types of closed questions were used in the survey. The first type has ordered response categories. An ordered response is when a number of choices can be given, which have same logical order. In our Survey we used scales like strongly agree to strongly disagree. The other type of closed questions were with an unordered response, it allowed the user choose from the available options. This was most appropriate for collecting demographic information, gender and preferences. The users were in some questions given the choice to select more than one answer.

The limitation of this study is the small sample size and all the users are Turkish. Study shows that Turkish people are using Instant messenger to contact each other and they are happy with chatting functionality of IM and shows that the gender is not a parameter that effects the usage of IM where the age is have an impact on the usage. It is clear that the functionalities that need high technology need to be improved within the IM Technically, respondents tend to have expectation that all IM applications should have same feature so they could interoperability each other. Therefore, this considerable study should have big implication in redesigning IM applications.