Personal Mobile Messaging in Context

Abstract

Mobile text messaging is one of the most important communication channels today, but it suffers from lack of expressiveness, context and emotional awareness, compared to face-to-face communication. We address this problem by augmenting text messaging with information about users and contexts. We present and reflect on lessons learned from three field studies, in which we deployed augmentation concepts as prototype chat apps in users’ daily lives. We studied (1) subtly conveying context via dynamic font personalisation ( TapScript ), (2) integrating and sharing physiological data – namely heart rate – implicitly or explicitly ( HeartChat ) and (3) automatic annotation of various context cues: music, distance, weather and activities ( ContextChat ). Based on our studies, we discuss chat augmentation with respect to privacy concerns, understandability, connectedness and inferring context in addition to methodological lessons learned. Finally, we propose a design space for chat augmentation to guide future research, and conclude with practical design implications.