Designing finger movement on mobile phone touch screen for rich emotional expression

Emotional expression is significant as an essential part in our daily life. Ubiquitous presence of mobile technology-mediated communication creates various affective occasions and affords rich emotional expressions with lower complexity of input. In this paper, we aim to design a simple way of emotional expression through finger movements on mobile phone touch screen allowing for richer affective expressivities. We categorize the visual representations into four types according to their modality and then raised a schema that including three core properties of touch-screen based finger movement dynamics. From design practice, we find the form and property of visual representation shapes the experience of expression and the way finger moves. Kinesthetic representation with its dynamic property can reflect the core properties of finger movement and thus afford the rich expressivity in presenting emotional experience. Thus, we indicate that simple finger movements based on mobile phone touch screens can express rich emotional experience. Moreover, we suggest designing appropriate and corresponding properties of visual representation regarding to the properties of finger movement as a meaningful and expressive material.