SLICEMAIL USING EMAIL GESTURES TO ELICIT EMOTION 

STRESS! No emotional catharsis or release; user is unsatisfied STRESS! No sense of progress or that a task has been completed STRESS! No mental break between successive emails STRESS MODEL TARGET AUDIENCE WHY SHOULD WE CARE? Students & young professionals that get many diverse emails and who are mobile email users We are inherently emotional beings, and one of our primary communication methods is inexpressive and monotonous 

The stressor we’re addressing is emotional stagnation for people that go through many emails as a daily routine. The calmer is emotional engagement with email, which they will experience through the expressive gestural responses that Slicemail evokes. 

DEMO 

TRIAL DESIGN Fully interactive web app with example emails and name personalization Qualitative and think-aloud observation Post-trial survey on likes/dislikes, and reactions Server logs of mapping from gestures to emails Synthesis and analysis of data 

TRIAL RESULTS Fast & practical Slow & deliberate SLICING HEART, FIRE, BOMB Frequent Infrequent Emails with little emotional attachment Emotionally evocative emails Users like smoothness and speed Users don’t see practicality, use case Key Insight: Dichotomy between fast & practical gestures (users like these better) and slower, emotionally engaging ones. Can we make the emotionally engaging gestures faster & easier without ‘cheapening’ them? Slice 3.73 Bomb 3.07 Slice [i] 3.69 Heart 3.49 Fire 3.00 n=26 

NEXT STEPS Incorporation into real email – were our results affected by test limitations / lack of real email? Practical & quick vs emotionally engaging gestures – are they mutually exclusive? Piggybacking off existing functionality & mental models [archive, star, etc.] 

TAKEAWAY Emotional gestures are a novel interaction paradigm that definitely need research and refinement before their incorporation into the established mental model of email. Gary Lee: [email protected] Huisi Li: [email protected] Cecilia Wu: [email protected] stanford.edu/~garylee wuxiaoci.com 

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INITIAL USER RESEARCH Users that feel that email is too emotionally inexpressive and repetitive need a sense-engaging moment to release emotion between tasks as a mental reward, a confirmation of task completion, and a break from monotony. POINT OF VIEW: My girlfriend broke up with me via email. I wanted to burn it, but all I could do was press trash and watch it vanish and show me my inbox again “ ” 

TRIAL 1 DESIGN A lifelike inbox with interactive delete gestures SLICE [DELETE]: BOMB [MULTIPLE DELETE]: 

TRIAL 1 RESULTS Users feel sensory gratification – definitely targets our stressors: More modes and gestures to map to specific emotions: Make it clear how the gesture works amongst existing email infrastructure and mental model: “I love it! I hate emails and I want to explode them!” “Blowing up this spam makes me happy” “I feel so satisfied by bombing my emails!” “Dude – this makes emails so much fun” “Can I shred my emails?” “I’d like to have more modes” “I could use a gesture for liking something” “This makes it much easier to get through email” “The action of slicing could be more clear.” “It would be nice to have visual instructions” “Can we archive our emails as another option?” “How can I undo an accidental gesture?” 

NEXT STEPS etc. Incorporation into real email – were our results affected by test limitations / lack of real email? Users didn’t see opportunities for the more dramatic gestures...but we didn’t use their real emails! Would realism & extended trial time have uncovered deeper emotional reactions to email that couldn’t be achieved through the fake templates? Practical & quick vs emotionally engaging gestures – are they mutually exclusive? Definitely want to explore this dichotomy more. Users say they like the idea of our stronger emotional gestures, but wish they were as speedy and practical as slicing. Do emotional gestures have to be really deliberate and speed-bumpy? Does making them swift cheapen them? Piggybacking off existing functionality & mental models [archive, star, etc.] Our users were reluctant to shed the idea that email is still intrinsically a productivity app. Rather than have our gestures as new speed-bumps, how can we incorporate them more naturally into existing features?