AniBalloons: Animated chat balloons as affective augmentation for social messaging and chatbot interaction

Despite being prominent and ubiquitous, message-based communication is limited in nonverbally conveying emotions. Besides emoticons or stickers, messaging users continue seeking richer options for affective communication. Recent research explored using chat-balloons’ shape and color to communicate emotional states. However, little work explored whether and how chat-balloon animations could be designed to convey emotions. We present the design of AniBalloons, 30 chat-balloon animations conveying Joy, Anger, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, and Calmness. Using AniBalloons as a research means, we conducted three studies to assess the animations’ affect recognizability and emotional properties ($N=40$), and probe how animated chat-balloons would influence communication experience in typical scenarios including instant messaging ($N=72$) and chatbot service ($N=70$). Our exploration contributes a set of chat-balloon animations to complement nonverbal affective communication for a range of text-message interfaces, and empirical insights into how animated chat-balloons might mediate particular conversation experiences (e.g., perceived interpersonal closeness, or chatbot personality).