Chat interaction improvement

Introduction
In the previous user experience researches, it was detected that the most common barrier that people face is related to follow the Flow and Rhythm of the conversation. People were not able to follow the conversations because of many reasons such as: users were not able to write quickly or to read quickly. Moreover, basing on the guideline of the WCAG 2.0 which says that users should be able to control the moving content, the reception of messages in chats should be controlled by users too. Then, the idea of adding a button to stop the reception of messages when the user was overwhelmed emerged.
Evaluation
A UCD design was followed to include this new functionality in a chat interface. Firstly, users with disabilities, without disabilities and elderly people were asked about this new functionality in a hypothetical situation. Questionnaire and interview methods were used in order to obtain user opinions. The results showed that more than 87% of people considered that this new functionality could be useful for them.
This percentage indicates that this new button could be useful in a hypothetical situation, not in a real situation. Thus, it was necessary to evaluate the new functionality in a real situation. As a result, a Mockup prototype was created basing on the Whatsapp interface and adding a new button to control the reception of messages.
The prototype was validated with real users in a learning situation through one-to-one and one-to-many conversations. To validate it, observation and interview methods were used in order to know the user opinions and reactions.
Problems
The results of the research are being analyzed from a statistical point of view. Thus, they have not been published yet. In contrast, the Output section shows some parts of the researches, which have been already published.
Duration
Twelve months (2014)
Team
Rocío Calvo
Ana Iglesias
Lourdes Moreno
Awards
Jesús Llorés Award provided by the Spanish association of Human Computer Interaction (AIPO)
Applied Skills and Methods
Questionnaires
Guided interviews
Prototypes
HTML5
CSS3
PHP
MySQL
Mockup
User Testing
Outputs
Conference: "An Accessible Chat Prototype for Screen Reader Users in Mobile Devices" and "Chats for all: A user survey to improve chats' interaction"
Journal: "User-Centered Requirement Engineering for Accessible Chats in m-Learning"