Browsing by Author "Pirzadeh, Afarin"

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    Emotional communication in instant messaging
    (2015-10-29) Pirzadeh, Afarin; Bolchini, Davide; Voida, Stephen; Stolterman, Erik; Wada, Terri
    Emotional communication is fundamental to everyday interaction. How well emotions are communicated is crucial to interpersonal relationships and individual well-being. Emotional communication in instant messaging (IM), however, can be challenging because of the absence of visual and aural nonverbal behaviors. Despite the growing number of technologically-focused solutions for supporting emotional communication in IM, limited design research has been done to study the actual users’ behaviors in communicating their emotion in IM and strategies they use to adapt emotional communication in this medium, with the purpose of establishing design solutions to support users' emotional communication. Connecting several bodies of HCI, design, and communication literature in the context of IM, this dissertation critically examines how users communicate emotion in IM and accordingly establishes user-centered multi-touch gesture based design solutions to support emotional communication in this medium. Understanding how users communicate their emotion in IM, the design issues, and corresponding design solutions help researchers and designers to support the user's emotional needs, resulting in the improvement of emotional communication strategies in IM.
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    EXPRESSION OF EMOTION IN INSTANT MESSAGING
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2012-04-13) Pirzadeh, Afarin; Pfaff, Mark S.
    Emotion expression in text-based instant messaging (IM) has received little empirical scrutiny. The emotional cues people use to express their dif-ferent emotions in IM communication and how their personality traits affect those cues are the main focus of this study. Results of a preliminary study in IM suggest that in stressful situations people apply significantly fewer vocal spelling emotional cues than in non-stressful situations. There is also a sig-nificant relationship between conscientiousness as a personality trait and use of lexical surrogate emotional cues in this type of communication. Our pro-posed study expands upon preliminary data to uncover more significant dif-ferences among the emotional cues people use to express different emotions in IM, including the role of relevant personality traits. Identifying how users express emotions in IM assists researchers and designers in focusing on the users’ emotional needs and results in the improvement of emotional com-munication strategies in IM.
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    Gestchat (A Tool to Support Emotional Communication in Text Messaging)
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Pirzadeh, Afarin; Donnelly, Kaelyn; Elbin, Julie; Lin, Ann Marie May; Yu, Xing
    We introduce a new mobile instant messaging application, which specifically support users’ emotional communication. The invention relates to a novel method in instant messaging to input interactive emoticons through multi-touch gestures. We add additional mode of gesture to instant messaging keyboard and also send text in different colors to present the emotion.
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    Personal Informatics and Reflection: A Critical Examination of the Nature of Reflection
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2013-04-05) Pirzadeh, Afarin; He, Li; Stolterman, Erik
    Personal informatics systems that help people both collect and reflect on various kinds of personal information are growing rapidly. Despite the importance of journaling and the main role it has in tracking one’s personal growth, a limited number of studies have examined journaling in the area of personal informatics in detail. In this paper, we critically examine the process of reflection on experiences, thoughts and evolving insights through a qualitative research study. We also present the design research process we conducted to develop the Wandering Mind as a support tool to help individuals record and reflect on their experiences.