Screenshot: nicoladoering.de
Usability News (Ann Light) wrote an articel about the research of Nicola Döring (Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany) on multimedia messaging services:
“Analysing 575 pictorial emails and 343 MMS from her 112 German-speaking participants (split fairly equally along gender lines and representing ages from 14 to 51), the team used the categories of ‘affective’ and ‘instrumental’ to break down the use of pictures, finding that 72% fell into the first of the two groups. Further subdivisions revealed that 24% of MMS were sent as greetings; followed by 23% as ‘gift giving’, defined as those accompanied by a message to the receiver that is highly personal and written in such a way that ‘the message takes on the character of being a little gift’. Other affective uses included: joking at 9%, teasing at 7% and relationship maintenance at 5%. Messages were generally short and fell fairly neatly into one category or another.
‘Teasing’ was perhaps the most interesting category in terms of the need for shared contextual knowledge to interpret the message and/or the relationship between text and image: ‘allusions are made that can hardly be understood by outsiders’, said Döring. This was a more personal group of messages than those classified as ‘joking’, though also entailing jokes and humour. Sadly, her delightful examples cannot be reproduced here.
Of the instrumental MMS, most were classified as news, at 12% of all the messages, with appointments at 6% and information at 6%.”
Internetverweis
Mobile Age: The Stories that Pictures tell
Homesite of Nicola Döring
