Audio and Chat Combined - Are Two Media Better Than One?

Meetings and collaborative work are part of the everyday business life. Audio communication in the form of VoIP and instant messaging-based chat communication offer new and inexpensive ways to communicate in groups. Our previous research has shown that the selection of either audio or chat has a significant impact on the collaborative productivity. This experiment observes the impact of selecting both audio and chat communication at the same time. We analyze whether the polychronicity helps to achieve a higher productivity. This work provides quantitative, experimental-based data. We show with this data that typical users are overwhelmed by the combination of both media. The complexity of listening to the audio conversation, reading the chat dialog and observing the shared whitespace together with communicating seems to induce too high a cognitive load on the user, thus preventing productive work. This paper shows the importance of quantitative experiments about polychronicity and proposes further work about the correlation of media synchronicity and polychronicity research.