“It’s More Like a Letter”: An Exploration of Mediated Conversational Effort in Message Builder
This post summarizes our paper “It’s More Like a Letter”: An Exploration of Mediated Conversational Effort in Message Builder, which will be presented on the 6th of November at the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing.
Interaction designers often strive to create products that are efficient and easy to use. This means that the concept of ‘user effort’ is typically seen as a negative quality that is detrimental to users’ experiences with digital technology.
However, this characterisation of effort is questionable when applied to settings in which efficient task completion is not always the user’s primary goal. Consider the scenario of a close personal relationship. In this setting, people are not always concerned with efficiency and ease-of-use. Instead, people usually want to invest effort into their interactions with others, and are willing to do as a contribution to a caring relationship.
How might technologies for close relationships mediate this kind of effort? Our research has been exploring this question by investigating how communication technologies might demand effort in the course of a conversation. We find this idea to be interesting because it runs counter to what we have become accustomed to in our everyday lives. For example, the majority of modern instant messaging (IM) applications provide features that try to make the act of communication easier, typically through the use of AI or machine learning algorithms — autocorrect, sticker suggestions, and ‘smart assistants’ are all examples of these. What would happen if we removed these features and made IM ‘effortful to use’?
An Effortful Communication System
Our paper focuses on Message Builder (see Figure 1), a prototype application that demands effort in a number of different ways. Specifically:
· Message Builder requires users to send progressively longer messages over time. It does this by tracking the character count of each message, and by requiring each sent message to be at least one character longer than the last. Users can reset the character count at any time if it becomes too high for their liking.
· Message Builder is implemented as a web browser application, not an app. This means that users have to visit a hyperlink to access the system, allowing us to probe the acceptability of a system that requires effort to access.
· Message Builder does not provide users with notifications of new messages. Instead, users have to invest effort to check the system and update themselves about the conversation.
Our aim with Message Builder was to explore the potential meaning and value of effort in close personal communication. Rather than trying to design something that people would be keen to adopt right away, we intended the design to be a mechanism for understanding issues around effort that are important to users, and for exploring how the introduction of effort might reshape the communication experience. How would people react to a system that requires effort to use? What routines would evolve around it? And would people find any value in it at all?
To explore these questions, we trialled Message Builder with 14 pairs of people, all of whom used the system to communicate with a friend or romantic partner over a period of 2–3 weeks. Rather than giving them instructions about how to use the system, we allowed them to use it whenever and wherever they wished. After the deployment period, we collected their feedback and tried to understand whether there might be value in stimulating effortful communication practices with systems like Message Builder.
What We Found
Several of the pairs in our study were baffled by the idea of Message Builder. These people thought that the system wasn’t as user-friendly as other applications, and they struggled to conduct the kinds of quick-fire conversations that they were accustomed to. “It’s difficult to use!”, one person told us. People also disliked the extra effort that was required to use Message Builder in a web browser. Others missed the presence of notifications in alerting them to new messages.
However, some pairs in the study were able to find a role for Message Builder. These people seemed to derive considerable value from the system, primarily because it encouraged them to spend more time on their communications. In particular, the presence of the escalating word count became a target that participants wanted to maintain — rather than hitting the “Reset” button, many preferred to write a longer message to their partner.
The increasing word count also caused some participants to shift to a pattern of communication that was described as long, detailed and more protracted than usual. This was seen as markedly different to the kinds of exchanges participants had in other apps. As one person told us, Message Builder did not function as a lightweight IM application. Rather, correspondence felt “more like a letter”, and the act of writing to a partner was described as requiring the dedication of thought, time, and care. Participants described sitting down to focus on writing replies in Message Builder, as opposed to replying straight away. One couple described how they settled into a routine of writing an especially effortful message once per day. Overall, we found that the escalating character count helped to reshape participants’ communication practices in a way that led to new forms of intimate relational maintenance.
Practical and Design Implications
Our study of Message Builder provides some valuable lessons about the way in which technologies could be designed to encourage effortful communication.
First, it was clear to us that people value elements of contemporary apps that permit convenient and accessible communication. Features like notifications and a ‘dedicated app’ help people to maintain awareness about the status of a conversation, and alert them to the presence of new messages. This suggests that effortful communication should not be about making things procedurally difficult, at least not in the sense of raising the costs of operations that support an ongoing connection with others.
Instead, we think that effortful communication should be about fostering moments of intimate pause that encourage deep interpersonal sharing as a contribution to caring practices. In Message Builder, these outcomes were achieved through the escalating character count, which helped to promote effortful maintenance by requiring more text with each message. This is not to say that future communication systems should include a character count as a way of creating productive outcomes. What Message Builder should do is encourage designers to think deeply about how tools could guide users towards effortful maintenance, irrespective of how this is achieved. Too many systems encourage users to communicate mindlessly, attempting to alleviate the ‘burden’ of interpersonal connection through immediate and simple resolution. Although these designs may have some value, the risk of their proliferation is that our interactions with others may lose meaning. In turn, they may become stilted, mechanical, or even robotic. We hope that Message Builder can help designers to think about communication systems that remind us of what it means to be human.
Please contact Ryan Kelly if you have questions, comments, or if you would like to know more about the research.
Citation: Ryan Kelly, Daniel Gooch, and Leon Watts. 2018. “It’s More Like a Letter”: An Exploration of Mediated Conversational E ort in Message Builder. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW, Article 87 (November 2018), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274356
