Group Conversation
From Social Patterns
Contents |
What
Multiple people want to have a discussion together about a topic of interest.
Yahoo!'s short lived video chat program allowed groups of people to chat both in text and video.
Use When
- Use to enable multiple users converse in real time.
- Use within communication tools to expand the opportunities for conversation.
How
- Show the user a large enough window to keep up with the ongoing conversation.
- Provide a field for the user to enter their participating thoughts.
- Fields should be flexible and be able to be resized.
- Provide tools for text shortcuts like emoticons to visually impart emotions like laughing, sarcasm, sadness etc. If possible, show the graphic interpretation of the text symbols.
- Clearly indicate who is saying what. Show the speaker’s name and consider showing a time stamp for each part of the conversation.
Private Group conversations
Any user can intiate a group chat in AIM by inviting others from their buddy list.
- Allow one person to initiate a conversation and invite other participants on the fly.
- Provide a list of people for creating group conversations. (See Buddy list)
- Allow the user to save a transcription of the chat as a text file.
Public Group conversations
- Allow users to create public conversation spaces on the fly.
- Provide a search mechanism for user to easily discover public conversations.
- If the conversation space is initiated by a user, allow them to name the room so that it can be found by others through searching or browsing.
- Allow the space to be stored for later or repeat use.
- Consider promoting or featuring interesting group discussions.
Related Patterns
