Understanding User Satisfaction With Instant Messaging: An Empirical Survey Study

Abstract

The current article examines user satisfaction with instant messaging in building and maintaining social relationships with friends, family members, and others. The research model integrates motivation theory with media capacity theories to explain how the attributes of media capacity (e.g., social presence and media richness) and users' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations toward using instant messaging influence user satisfaction. Data were collected from a sample of 247 Chinese university students via an online survey. The results suggest that perceived enjoyment, perceived social presence, and perceived usefulness are key to user satisfaction. Perceived social presence and perceived media richness are positively associated with perceived enjoyment. It was also found that perceived enjoyment, perceived social presence, and perceived media richness have significant effects on perceived usefulness. Of interest, perceived enjoyment and perceived social presence have stronger effects on user satisfaction than perceived usefulness.

Acknowledgments

The work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 70971081/G011201) and a grant from the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 9451503101003590). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier version of this article.