Mediating Intimacy with DearBoard: a Co-Customizable Keyboard for Everyday Messaging

Title of the Paper

Enhancing Intimate Relationships through DearBoard: A Co-Customizable Keyboard for Everyday Messaging Applications

Paper Information

• Field of Study: Human-Computer Interaction Design, focusing on using technology to foster intimacy
• Keywords: Computer-mediated communication, intimate relationships, soft keyboard, co-customization, messaging application ecosystem, user interface, nonverbal communication, emojis, GIFs

Research Background and Issues

• Problems or Challenges:

  • Current messaging applications typically offer only private customization features, lacking options for co-customization that could better support nonverbal interactions in intimate relationships.
  • The ways to express intimacy in online communication are significantly constrained by the design and functionality of existing applications.
  • Maintaining intimate relationships requires mediums that reflect deeper relational connections, yet there remains a substantial design gap in existing solutions.

• Importance:

  • With the proliferation of digital communication, messaging apps have become critical tools for maintaining intimate relationships. Developing features that express intimacy, interactivity, and shared identity is therefore highly significant.
  • Providing two users with the ability to jointly customize user interfaces can help convey shared histories, inside jokes, and emotional bonds.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Previous studies have explored how communication technologies foster intimacy through emojis, message content, and novel interaction modes.
  • While some commercial platforms support limited co-customization, this design space remains underexplored.
  • DearBoard is introduced to investigate how co-customization at the keyboard level can enhance the messaging app ecosystem and to enrich the design framework in this domain through case studies.

Solution

• Methods and Solutions:

  • The authors designed and developed an Android soft keyboard called DearBoard, which allows two users to co-customize the keyboard's color themes and emoji/GIF shortcut toolbar.
  • DearBoard is an app-agnostic tool, enabling users to utilize these co-customization features across different applications, thereby enhancing ecosystem cohesion.

• Innovations:

  • Introduced the concept of co-customization, allowing two users to collaboratively edit the user interface, embedding more intimacy and interactivity into a wide range of everyday messaging applications.
  • Leveraged the soft keyboard as a "Trojan horse" to embed new features into existing, unmodifiable messaging apps while preserving users' current ecosystems and communication habits.
  • DearBoard provides the first technical case study for academic and design research on cross-application functionality extensibility and support for user relationships.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  • Extended the Android open-source soft keyboard LatinIME to develop color customization and emoji/GIF toolbar features.
  • Used server-side synchronization and group IDs to update co-customization settings in real-time.
  • Solved the technical challenge of identifying communication partners across apps using image comparison methods.
  • Conducted a 5-week field study, collecting log data and conducting semi-structured interviews to understand user behavior and experiences.

Research Outcomes

• Specific Findings:

  • Users utilized DearBoard to express shared interests, memories, and inside jokes within their relationships, highlighting the diverse uses of co-customization: as an interface optimization (improving efficiency), as decoration, or as a means to support conversational themes and nonverbal interactions.
  • Most participants fully leveraged the co-customization features to enhance the emotional connection and entertainment value of their communication, with 88% expressing a willingness to continue using DearBoard.

• Advantages over Existing Solutions:

  • DearBoard transcends the limitations of single-app functionalities, allowing users to extend personalization and co-customization across the entire app ecosystem, making communication more flexible.
  • Introduced support for dynamic shared spaces (intimate communication places), transforming the messaging interface into a virtual area reflecting relational characteristics.

• Experiment and Evaluation Results:

  • User cases demonstrated that co-customization fosters intimate interactions through nonverbal means, with some users perceiving it as a "digital gift" or a novel method for instant nonverbal communication.
  • Negotiations over collaborative content management (e.g., choosing color themes and shortcut symbols) revealed diverse social dynamics, enriching users' interaction experiences.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations:

    • Communication patterns of some users were disrupted during the study due to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among cohabiting participants whose messaging frequency decreased.
    • The study focused on dyadic relationships, which may not fully capture the characteristics of group collaboration.
    • The current implementation of co-customization options is limited to color themes and emoji toolbars, requiring further expansion to validate generalizability.

  • Future Work:

    • Develop more complex co-customization options and explore solutions suitable for multi-user groups or teams.
    • Investigate the impact of cultural differences or specific relationship dynamics to optimize designs for diverse user needs.
    • Explore how soft keyboards can extend more nonverbal functionalities and support broader application scenarios (e.g., video conferencing and collaboration tools).

In summary, DearBoard offers an innovative design that demonstrates how co-customization can serve as a breakthrough technology for fostering intimate relationships. It enables new possibilities for emotional expression at the user interface level while enriching the research landscape of app-agnostic communication enhancement tools.