To see the design ideas, please visit the photos folder in the github repository.

Testing Analysis

Interviews

From the interviews, four key communication scenarios were developed:

• Professional
• Family
• Friends
• Love interest

Professional communication required a chat history to refer back to answers for technical questions. It also required no read-receipts, as this was deemed too intrusive in an environment people are being paid to be produtive within, feeling this would put extra pressure on to respond. Also, a lot of the emphasis was on not wanting or not knowing the person well enough. This meant both parties hadn't established a convention and were wary of miscommunication or misintepretation, such as by perceived shunning rather than simple busyness.

Family felt the need to communicate short ideas quickly, such as what time dinner might be prepared. This was because a lot of communication would get done in the home or face-to-face. Other research indicated sometimes family members like to use a "butler lie" or a white lie about their availability, to prevent being contacted at times where this is undesireable.

Friends was a key group because they often use previews to prevent sending a signal of availability. They also use speed of reply to gauge availability and otherwise try to ordain their friend's availability through familiarity with their lifestyle (e.g. employment).

Interacting with love interests was found to make use of a stronger sense of presence through Snapchat, because of its lack of message previews and a prominent feature for showing when the other participants are in the current chat. This sense of presence, including notifications that the other has started typing, were felt by users to increase honesty and convey a better sense of personality to each other. The lack of chat history also allowed for social faux pas to be forgotten without record.

Affinity 'Diagram'

• Theme

  • P#: quote

• Social vs Business - Don't want to get to know them

  • P1: "I couldn't see [SnapChat (ephemeral -> urgent)] working well in a commercial setting at all where you have to be careful about- where you don't know people that well or you don't want to get to know them in a personal manner. I think that's where you really need to tread a bit more lightly and make sure you're a bit more responsible for what you talk about, what you say."

• Ephemeral vs Recorded:

• For Ephemeral

  • P1: it's kind of nice to know that just like in conversation in real life once you say something the storage of that conversation is in people's brains, not on a memory card. So I guess it helps me get [over] the thought of saying something wrong... If you say something embarassing or you deal with it in real time and you can be comfortable and forget about the weird thing you said because there's not this physical reminder of you mistaking, you know, a maths equation or something like that ... It's not a sort of phyiscal record that pepole can refer to, which is nice" "It exacerbates honesty"

• For Recorded

  • P3: highly techincal question, refer back to answer. dont know why he'd want to have no history. makes it easier to organise things It's tricky because there are cases for and against ephemeral messaging. Do we have to just separate those options into different services or can we merge them into one? How then do people negotiate which option to use? Facebook secret/temporary chats.

• Privacy

  • P1: the lack of record on SnapChat is a privacy thing
  • P2: "[I prefer] WhatsApp because it's a bit more simple and the fact that it's just removed from- it's not connected to Facebook... I think it's going out ofr favour now because in the latest update or something.." (you had to agree to new terms and conditions)

• Previewing:

• No previews

  • P1: "I liked the challenge of having to respond off the cuff""I'm sure everbody at times can be, especially when if they're talking to a crush or something like that, they want to make sure they're not stuffing things up, thre's going to be a certain level of worry about it. So of course there's times where I go I wish I can see the message so I've got a bit more time to make sure I don't say something dumb, but the whole process of that is the exciting part."
  • P1: "If I was busy, I wouldn't even slightly give it a read. The chance of it dropping away and me forgetting about what it is, it's also a chance of sending a signal to someone that I'm actively not responding to them, or I'm neglecting a message, which I don't think that's even if it's honest, it's never a good signal to receieve from someone else"

• Previews

  • P1: "When you're talking to your friends sometimes you're in this weird kind of gray zone where you're too busy to engage in a proper conversation but you also have time to read what they say and see what's going on. So I think for an example if it's an alert of some sort like, oh hey you've left the iron on at home or hey can you please do this or that, like the kind of simple little ocmmunication things, its kind of helpful to be able to quickly see that or have a preview of it.
  • P2: "Yeah I do find [previews] useful because at least I can just get a flash of what it might be about beacause if its something urgent or something that might be urgent Im gonna have a look at it"
    Do you think that after a certain amount of time someone has definitely received the message and just read the preview

• Guessing Availability:

  • P1: "I'd say that I wouldn't expect someone if I knew that they had a job or if they were going to uni or had some sort of responsibility during a certain period of day, I wouldn't expect a full on conversation in those times but you neve know so I feel like it's always a bit of a guess where you just kind of thorw out a message an if they respond to it QUICKER.

• Interrupting:

• others

  • P1: "...there's a chance they could get back to you while they're busy but tomseimtes you just don't want to do that. Sometimes you want to let someone do their thing and then hit them up after"
  • P2: "I don't [think about disruptiveness of my message] jut cause I'm more used to just getting messages and calls at work and I'm used to it, so I don't think about that so much." "more so if im calling someone, definitely im also conscious of that"

• yourself

• ..at work

  • P1: "I'm in that [grey] zone a lot at work where I have the capability to respond to messages, it's not like I would be in trouble for responding to one message or reading a message, it's not like I'm too busy and physically engaged witgh something where I can't, but at the same time I don't want to disrupt my working patterns and I don't want to stop what I'm doing."
  • P1 uses DND mode for concentration times

• ..with friends

  • P1: "I might see a preview but my ability to shut down a current conversation or to leave that social circle and then go and engage in something else or reply to it's pretty hard adn the chances of me doign that is pretty low unless it was urgent."

• ..sporting

  • P1: "at ... events that requires me or sporting then that requires me to be close ot a hundred percent in person and there's not many chances for me to drop off to my phone"

• Constant/Ubiquitous Availability, at some %:

  • P1: "at ... events that requires me or sporting then that requires me to be close ot a hundred percent in person and there's not many chances for me to drop off to my phone"
  • Research: Habits inform smartphone usage, or whatever it was called
  • P1: "The nature of messages gives you a small feeling of I should respond to this... You;re constantly making decisions on whether or not you will or you wont and obviously thats all just affecte4d by what youre doing at the time but then also about the nature of the relationshop with the person, if its a good firend of yours or sometone that youre fonident that they know how you operate or what youre doing the you feel more comfortable, the pressure of actually responding when you can't is a lot lower because you feel like they have go the capactiy to understand you cant message back at that time. Whereas if it's someone unknown then yeah the pressure is higher because youre like well this person doesnt know me yet i dont think they understand... I think everybody would feel a little bit of pressure no mateter who the person is meagiging the mt orespond" "it just feels unhuman not to respond to someone or not respodn to something"

• Speed

  • P2: "[I would call over email] if I wanted osomething to happen stragiht away. If youre emailign someone it might not happen for a weke or you might not even get a response depending on what people are like with their emails"

• Read Receipts:

• Shunning

  • P1: With Snapchat (no preview): "If I was busy, I wouldn't even slightly give it a read. The chance of it dropping away and me forgetting about what it is, it's also a chance of sending a signal to someone that I'm actively not responding to them, or I'm neglecting a message, which I don't think that's even if it's honest, it's never a good signal to receieve from someone else"
  • P1: "It can be neutral because someone can be oh yeah he's seen it and he's busy but then some people can take it the wrong way and go oh he's shunning me or ignoring me, ghosting me. That's where the preview somes in nicelt is that you can gauge that quicker." (the presence of the technology changes the convention for replying and therefore inference of availability)
  • P1: "If I was to reply, to open up a Snapchat message and reply on that they it would be less, should probably be more short or I would be forced to tell someone that I'm busy, whereas on messenger I'll never tell someone that I- the process of telling someone you're busy is not replying whereas on Snapchat you avtuall'y have to be like I'm busy I'll reply later."

Overview It's all Relative - it depends on the person and the conversation.
Designing for such a general purpose tool is difficult. It would have been a lot easier to segment the audience, look at specific circumstances and design for those, but that would be like lying abot the reality of the situation by ignoring everyone who has the issue. Maybe it can't be gracefully solved without first dividing and conquering. But several themes have emerged that hold some hope.

For instance, there is a general desire to not to use messaging apps for business communications because it seems like this presumes or somehow inherently resutls in getting to know the person better. The medium informs the communication. This is because of convention.

And not everyone is on board with convention because the area is a burgeoning one. Still.

Prototype

Both the interim and final prototype testing was done with talk-aloud walkthroughs. Notes were collected and have been synthesised in the user testing raw data page.