Text messaging plays a vital role in developing and sustaining romantic relationships. While there would be various difficulties in communication between romantic partners via text messaging, I focused on the two most common challenges in this thesis. First, continuing a good conversation is often challenging to achieve via text messages particularly with an unfamiliar person in potential romantic contexts. Secondly, affectionate communication, the conveyance of closeness, care, and fondness for another, is restrained in text messaging. Hence, this thesis explores the effects of two novel interactive systems designed to tackle these problems.

To facilitate continuing a good conversation, I first identified obstacles to keeping the conversational flow through a need-finding study...[ Read more ]

Text messaging plays a vital role in developing and sustaining romantic relationships. While there would be various difficulties in communication between romantic partners via text messaging, I focused on the two most common challenges in this thesis. First, continuing a good conversation is often challenging to achieve via text messages particularly with an unfamiliar person in potential romantic contexts. Secondly, affectionate communication, the conveyance of closeness, care, and fondness for another, is restrained in text messaging. Hence, this thesis explores the effects of two novel interactive systems designed to tackle these problems.

To facilitate continuing a good conversation, I first identified obstacles to keeping the conversational flow through a need-finding study with 14 people, with the primary issue being identifying proper topics as conversations unfold. Then I proposed a proof-of-concept prototype, Tomi that dynamically suggests conversation topic keywords based on incoming messages. It selects a seed from a sentence, then returns five relevant and extended topic keywords for each incoming message. In a qualitative study with 16 participants, users reported that suggestions not only boost their confidence but also mitigate burden during chatting. To handle the affectionate communication issue, I propose a novel interactive system Lily which gives users inspirations to enrich their romantic expressions in text messaging. It first listens to users’ original input and then recommends romantic lyrics holding the closest meaning in real-time during chats with partners. After a three-day empirical study, participants who are real-life couples reported that they not only received useful cues from Lily in terms of how to polish their affectionate expressions but also learnt to enrich the conversation with topics enlightened by its recommendations. Finally, based on our findings from these two studies, I provided design considerations to enhance the quality of conversations in text messaging for developing and sustaining romantic relationships.

Based on the reflection of two studies with Tomi and Lily, I further discuss users’ perception such a stimuli as a social actor or IT artifact as it influences on users’ engagement on the system. Also, I discuss that the possible usage of the suggestions beyond the linguistic enhancement. Then I provide descriptions regarding how this thesis research could be applied in more diverse contexts other than a romantic context, with several specific examples. After I describe my personal reflection of the M.Phil. study at the end of the general discussion, I finally conclude this thesis research.