In situ informants exploring an emotional mobile messaging system in their everyday practice

We have designed and built a mobile emotional messaging system named eMoto. With it, users can compose messages through using emotion-related gestures as input, rendering a background of colours, shapes and animations expressing the emotional content. The design intent behind eMoto was that it should be engaging physically, intellectually and socially, and would provide for an aesthetic experience. In here, we describe the user-centred design process that lead to the eMoto system, but focus mainly on the final study where we let five friends use eMoto for two weeks. The study method used combined Experience clips – where one user is equipped with the system and a friend acts as a spectator documenting experiences of use in situ – with Cultural probes – a set of provocative materials that users respond to and thereby document their own practice and understanding of the system. The five users and five of their friends acting as spectators were able to report and reflect on their communication patterns, their friendships, their physical, intellectual and social experience of their own emotions and reactions to the emotional messages they received. We have chosen to name the five users and their spectators in situ informants, highlighting how this combination of user-centred study methods helped us enter and explore the subjective and distributed experiences of use, as well as how emotional communication unfolds in everyday practice when channelled through a system like eMoto.