I'm working on a project that involves displaying a text-only conversation between anywhere from two to ten or more people. The reader will be either zero or one of the participants.
The main UI will be web-based, but native clients may appear in the future.
For a two-person conversation I would show one person on one side of the screen and the other person on the other side, as most chat and IM apps do. If the reader was one of the participants their messages would be highlighted.
But, as computer screens are generally limited to two dimensions, the above doesn't scale well for a conversation between more than two people.
So, what's the most user-friendly way to go about displaying conversations between more than two people? The ability to scale with varying numbers of people would be a huge bonus, as would be the ability to handle cases where the reader is one of the members of the conversation.
If there's a take on the conventional 'speech bubbles' pattern that works, great, but I'm also not wedded to that and happy to consider completely alternate options.
Note: No, I'm not making another chat app. The world has enough of those already :-)
Answer
Perhaps you could use a balanced tree-like structure that grows outwards at the sides (alternately) as more people join the conversation.
Colour code it in vertical strips which each start as a new voice enters - like a piece of colourised vertically annotated choral music (a fugue?). You could maybe tail off a strip once that voice has had its last say so that the tree collapses inwards again.
Only a picture can explain this!!
It's food for thought - not a design specification.
You could add extra little big details like gradually reducing the thickness of a track as more time passes without input from the corresponding voice...
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