Qinyue presented an extended abstract entitled, “Bubble Coloring to Visualize the Speech Emotion” at CHI 2021 virtual conference, and Yuchun has co-authored the paper. As a part of Qinyue’s master thesis, the study explored the emotional effect of the chat bubble’s background color on voice messages. The empirical result demonstrated that the bubble color intensified the emotional conveyance of the voice message, and users were willing to use colored bubbles to visualize their emotions.
Abstract
To explore the emotional effect of the chat bubble’s background color on voice messages, we carried out a user survey with Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and KakaoTalk, which use blue, green, and yellow, respectively, as the default color for chat bubbles. We provided the colors in orange, dark red, dark grey, and pale blue when the voice message seemed to be in an excited, angry, sad, or serene mood, respectively. With the exception of the serene, the emotion was intensified through the background color across the three messengers. Concerning willingness to use, the likelihood was reduced, particularly in negative emotions. Based on the empirical evidence, we discussed the potentials and concerns when the method is implemented in voice messaging.