Can Graphical Interaction Increase Feelings of Conveying and Understanding in On-Line Group Discussion?

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a text chat system to support graphical interaction for on-line group discussion and investigate whether our graphical text chat system increases a speaker's feeling of conveying and a listener's feeling of understanding in on-line group discussion. For on-line communication, in particular at group discussion, text chat is a very popular and widely used communication tool. Not only text messages but also graphical ones are available in recent chat systems, and many graphical text chat systems exist. However, whether and how such graphical text chat systems contribute to both feelings of conveying and understanding between users remains unknown. In this study, we developed a graphical text chat system that enables users to exchange interpretations of the concepts contained in each other's text messages as images. Our experimental results demonstrate that the developed system increased both conveying and understanding feelings between users from both the speaker and listener viewpoints.

Keywords

• graphical text chat
• on-line communication
• visualization
• multimedia