A Foundation for Emotional Expressivity

Abstract
To express emotions to others in mobile text messaging in our view require designs that can both capture some of the ambiguity and subtleness that characterizes emotional interaction and keep the media specific qualities. Through the use of a body movement analysis and a dimensional model of emotion experiences, we arrived at a design for a mobile messaging service, eMoto. The service makes use of the sub-symbolic expressions; colors, shapes and animations, for expressing emotions in an open-ended way. Here we present the design process and a user study of those expressions, where the results show that the use of these sub-symbolic expressions can work as a foundation to use as a creative tool, but still allowing for the communication to be situated. The inspiration taken from body movements proved to be very useful as a design input. It was also reflected in the way our subjects described the expressions.

Keywords Affect, Handheld Devices and Mobile Computing, Interaction Design, User-Centered Design/Human-Centered Design, User studies.

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First presented at the conference on Designing for User eXperience, November 3-5, 2005, San Francisco, CA