2010 - 2012

In the use of social networking services, crafting one’s identity is one of the fundamental activities that enable people to interact with others as unique individuals. The early SNSs like MySpace and Cyworld provided many visual features such as profile decoration and avatar customization so that people can expressively portrait and distinguish themselves from others. However, as a new trend of SNSs (SNS 2.0) emerge over recent several years, which needs to be visually simplistic to effectively support real time contents sharing, those visual features has been replaced by text-oriented contents, although individuals still want to express his/her characteristics without verbally articulating the details. In this new context, this study explores the potential of interactivity, the dynamic characteristics of interactive artifacts, as a new medium for self-expression in online communication. To do so, we first investigated whether people have preferences toward interactivity and how they are related to one’s personality. Then, we developed a social website where people can express themselves through interactivity and experience others through their interactivity expressions. Based on the understandings from the user study, practical design implications were discussed so that designers are able to strategically utilize interactivity for self-expression in online communication.