Text communication can be perceived as lacking in chat spontaneity, or plastic, due to medium limitations during interaction. A form of text messaging, Instant Messaging (IM), is now on the uptake, even on mobile handhelds. This paper presents results of using affective gesture to rubberise IM chat in order to improve synchronous communication spontaneity. The experimental design makes use of a text-only IM tool, running on handhelds, built with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE). The tool was developed with a novel user-defined hotkey – a one-click context menu that fast-tracks the creation and transmission of text-gestures and emoticons. A hybrid quantitative and qualitative approach was taken in order to enable data triangulation. Data collected from user trials affirms that the affective gesture hotkey facility improves chat responsiveness, thus enhancing chat spontaneity.
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