Designing for positive disclosure: What do you like today?

Abstract

This paper's premise is that technology has the potential to support the elicitation, expression and communication of positive thoughts. However, its success depends on understanding and incorporating appropriate strategies for interactive system design and development. Following in the positive psychology tradition, this paper presents two co-design studies investigating how positive thoughts can be mediated and shared. These studies involved approximately 50 participants, using paper-based questioning techniques and social–online tools that captured 151 contributions on what thoughts people like to share. The collected data demonstrated the potential for designing systems based on a prefix-based elicitation of positive emotions. Analysis of participants' contributions suggests that various messages of a predominantly positive nature can be harnessed, emphasising the importance of immediacy and situatedness in expression. Moreover, the analysis resulted in a set of design considerations for the design and development of positive expressive technologies. These considerations were used to develop a mobile application called PosiPost Me (Mobile Internet Edition) that allows users to create and share positive thoughts at any time and place. In this way, this research sets an exemplar of a design process for positive communicative systems while building on research in positive psychology, human–computer interaction and cognitive ergonomics. Relevance to industry The studies conducted showed the feasibility of proposed approach and opens new avenues for technologies aimed at positive communication and wellbeing in the mobile environment. It also offers a set of design considerations to support designers in creating such positive expressive technologies.