I met with two other designers and showed them my roughly sketched ideas. I gained two valuable nuggets of information:
- People are interacting with their phones abundantly when it's dangerous to (e.g. texting while driving). Using a feature that communicates mood through interaction, requiring the user to interact with a message before reading it, could be very dangerous. This added step could not only be a annoying, but also troubling. So I will rule out how interaction can affect mood.
- Sketching out features that fully use the background made me realize that doing so will eliminate the ability to log mood and directly link them to a message. A designer pointed out I could do something along the lines of Exquisite Corpse.
This second nugget is great! Instead of using the whole background I can use the horizontal strip the same with as the message. Text messages have negative space on their opposite side and this would be great for me to use. I can view the active space of messages as a bar where text and moods are displayed. I feel this may even encourage people to type more (going back to my insight on how people use less words with texts) because the more you type, the more space you have to convey mood.
I refined four of my concepts, fleshing out more moods:
- Weather / environment: The horizontal space insight makes me think about layers and strata in addition the concept of building so this could lead to things beyond weather
- Messages that transform / move like facial features and body
- Animated & interactive avatars
- A screen that is able to change its texture and change temperature (fictitious)
To see the refined sketches…