Understanding the Challenges of Online Group Chat for Productive Discourse at Scale

Group chat allows multiple people in a remote setup to collaborate. As there can be many participants in a single chat conversation, it may be difficult for members of a group to keep up and stay grounded during the long stream of conversation generated by the participants. We conducted a need-finding study where we asked participants to work on various collaborative tasks in real-time chat software to learn about issues and behavioral patterns in a group chat conversation at a scale of five to ten people. We present the challenges in keeping up with messages, wasting effort due to a lack of cotemporality, and how challenges vary with the nature of collaborative tasks. We suggest a few design interventions that can address these challenges in chat software through temporal and spatial design changes.