I remember answering this, and the results are very interesting. Thank you for sharing!

If I may, I would like to add one more observation to your conclusions, which I think is at the core of how we interpret on-line conversations: it's not just that messages inside speech bubbles make it look like there's more text, it's also that chat messages mimic natural speech in a way that longform text (e.g. e-mail) doesn't (not most of the times, anyway). We think of chat messages as more spontaneous, and more heavily influenced by the other's replies (or lack thereof). Several speech bubbles in quick succession appear more desperate partly because they hint at the author's degrading confidence when faced with the absence of feedback, while a long-form text comes across as a stream of thought written in a single sitting — giving the impression that the writer knew beforehand what the point of the communication was, and understood exactly how the first couple of paragraphs relate to the last. This is in contrast to chat messages, where it seems like everything after the the first couple of messages was written on a whim. Of course, the conclusion here is pretty much the same as yours, since the only meaningful difference between all three versions you tested is formatting.

I didn't know there were multiple versions, that was quite interesting. Thanks for sharing :)

Hi guys! Awhile back, I posted a survey, which a whopping 1320 kind souls filled out! Here are the results; thanks for helping! :) I hope this is useful.

This isn't an issue with the UI, it's an issue with the user misusing and misinterpreting two entirely different UI functions.

Chat is for real-time interactions like a conversation. Email is for more detailed thoughts like a letter. One requires more urgency and a quicker response time than the other. If you treat chat like email or email like chat, of course you're going to look socially incompetent.

The guy in the experiment sent 4 separate messages in the FB chat without even getting a response back. He didn't even make sure she was there or even listening. That's like having a conversation with yourself. Of course, you're going to look socially incompetent.

If the guy sent 4 separate emails like he did with the messages, he would look just as socially incompetent if not more. Nobody sends emails like they're in a chat. If the user did that, would you say there's a problem with email UI now?

The problem isn't the UI design, it's with the user. If FB changed their chat to function like email, then it wouldn't be a chat anymore. It would defeat the whole purpose of chatting. They have messages for email-like communication already. Why would they change their chat to work like email just because one user doesn't understand how chatting works?

I totally disagree with the author's conclusions. It just goes to show that you can do good research, but come out with the wrongest conclusions. The research doesn't matter if you don't have the reasoning ability to interpret the results correctly. What's the point of doing research if you draw false conclusions? Reason will always be above research. Research is just supplementary.

The medium is the message.

That's why I hated Facebook for killing chat heads which made conversations feel more human and replace it with cold and sterile Messenger.

Great research though.