This is fantastic! Great work.

Agreed with Joe Blau; the new UI is really overwhelming. I don't want to feel stressed every time I open a new tab. :<

To #1, this isn't necessarily true of all devices and all contexts emojis occur.

Your teardowns are always a good time. Awesome stuff!

That would be super interesting to test! If you do a study on this, please share your results.

Me too! I'd love if people did follow-ups on this study; feel free to run with it and see. :)

Hey Anthony!

Thanks for your thoughts! I agree that the conclusion isn't wholly supported by the research; a follow-up study would be needed to clarify that.

That said, email wasn't a part of this study. This compared Facebook Chat with Facebook Full Conversation. For users of Facebook Chat, any content they send would be visible to the recipient in both formats. Notably, Facebook Full Conversation can be used in async, but can also support Chat-style conversations. (Actually, I never use Facebook Chat; I prefer to do any chatting on Facebook in Full Conversation view!) I typed the same in both instances, pressing enter after each messages, so really, there should be no differences of expectation.

While one could argue that Full Conversation is more like email than Chat, since it supports chat-style conversation and shares content with Chat, I think it is fair to compare them as different UIs to a similar context.

Thanks for participating! :D I really appreciated the help.

Thanks for your response Eduardo! I agree. That's something that I should add into the article. The typing style was the same for each condition; in Full Conversation, multiple messages in quick secession appear similarly to one longer message. It was a UI different (and a design decision) to call attention to each distinct message.

It would be super cool to repeat the study with all chat-style UIs (like Hangouts vs Facebook Chat vs iMessage, maybe?) and see how the different visual designs transform the perception.