Searching in Professional Instant Messaging Applications: User Behaviour, Intent, and Pain-points
Authors:
This study provides a thorough investigation of search within instant messaging applications (IMA) used in workplace settings (e.g., Slack and MS Teams), investigating search intents, user behaviour, points of friction, and missing functionalities. While IMAs are extensively used to accelerate communication between workers, user search behaviour in IMAs is still poorly understood, and search functionalities currently appear primitive and possibly lacking features that support the specific nature of search in this context.
We designed a mix-methods analysis based on three core studies that help us unveil search within IMAs. First, we created an in-depth diary study to capture user interactions when searching in professional IMAs, involving 17 participants spanning diverse geographies and yielding a total of 298 diary entries. The study comprised a pre-study interview with participants, followed by a structured diary form that captured essential metrics along with qualitative insights. The diary study was followed by a post-study interview focused on identifying and understanding failures, struggles and missing functionality. Subsequently, the insights learnt from the thematic coding of post-study interviews were utilized to develop a large-scale survey involving 222 participants out of 400 recruited through the Prolific platform.
Our findings suggest that while users find search functionalities within IMAs useful, there remains significant scope for improvement. The study sheds light on common search intents driving users to explore their message histories and the types of content that fulfil these intents. We outline potential features and required enhancements to improve searching within professional IMAs.