Interviewing over instant messaging

Interviews often serve as the cornerstone of human-computer interaction research. As a research method, they can both be deeply valuable and distinctly challenging. Pragmatic challenges of interviews include the travel that may be required to meet face-to-face with a respondent or the time necessary to transcribe the exchange. As a tool for conducting interviews, instant messaging presents some compelling potential benefits to mitigate challenges such as these. And yet, over the medium of instant messaging, the genre of the interview takes on a different character. Drawing from our experiences conducting interviews over instant messaging, we reflect on the implications of using this new medium for conducting interviews.