Using kinetic typography to convey emotion in text-based interpersonal communication

Text-based interpersonal communication tools such as instant messenger are widely used today. These tools often feature emoticons that people use to express emotion to some degree. However, emoticons still lack the ability to communicate the details of an emotional response, such as the speaker's tone of voice or intensity of emotion. In this paper, we hypothesize that kinetic typography - text that moves or changes over time - can address some of this problem by enhancing emotional qualities of text communication using its dynamic and expressive properties. This paper presents a study showing that a small sample of designers can create kinetic effects that end-users could employ to consistently convey emotion. In the study, three designers prepared 24 kinetic examples expressing four different emotions. We found that the examples were rated quite consistently by 66 participants. These findings provide a preliminary indication that designers can create predefined kinetic effects which can be applied to a variety of textual messages, and that these effects will reliably convey a particular emotional intent. The findings from this study inform design guidelines for designing an instant messaging client that uses kinetic typography presentation.