Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Chat Spaces (13 Sep 2004) Chat Spaces are rich persistent chats that provide light-weight shared workspaces for small to medium-scale group activities. Chat Spaces can accommodate brief, informal interactions (similar to Instant Messaging), and can also support longer-term complex threaded conversations including large numbers of people and shared resources. Our design maps a hierarchical thread representation onto a time-ordered two-column user interface. This mapping allows a user to follow the global dynamics of the entire thread in the chronological column on the left while being able to participate in a selected topical branch in a second column on the right. We also present a dynamic thread map that provides an overview of the entire conversation and supports quick navigation of topical branches in the thread. Article URL: http://domino.research.ibm.com/cambridge/research.nsf/2b4f81291401771785256976004a8d13/2dce4bfacdf3cc9f85256f0d008164f8?OpenDocument Read 201 more articles from IBM sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Flash Forums and ForumReader: Navigating a New Kind of Large-Scale Online Discussion     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy