Understanding User Satisfaction of Instant Messaging Usage: An Empirical Study

The current paper examines user satisfaction with the social use of instant messaging in building and maintaining social relationships among friends, family members and others. By integrating motivation theory with media capacity theories, we developed and tested a research model 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. The data were collected from students of a public university in China via an online survey. The results suggest that perceived enjoyment, perceived social presence and perceived usefulness are key to the formation of user satisfaction. Perceived social presence and perceived media richness are positively associated with perceived enjoyment. Also, we find that perceived enjoyment, perceived social presence, and perceived media richness have significant effects on perceived usefulness. And, interestingly, perceived enjoyment and perceived social presence, in relation to perceived usefulness, have stronger effects on user satisfaction.