• Journal of Information Management
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.1-16
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• 2004

In this paper, we outline the user interface problems that the text messaging users face to provide empirical basis for developing better improved mobile text messaging system. Our initial hypothesis was that the majority of the problems that the text messaging users face, namely, 1) difficulty in correctly understanding the intent of the incoming messages and 2) problem with frequently mis-addressing the recipient of the outgoing messages, can be accounted for by the poor usability of the text messaging user interface. Our analysis is based on the text message-based communication diaries, which were recorded for one week by each and every one of 75 college students, and survey taken from the same subjects. The data was collected in 2004. The students listed various difficulties including the limited message length, obscure input method, lack of mean to express emotional content, lack of receipt confirmation, lack of auto save feature when preparing messages to send, and lack of means to permanently save messages. Some of these problems were also identified in the previous studies. However, we were able to gather additional problems that the users face and also elicit potential solutions to remedy the problems. From these findings and analysis, we attempted to provide ways to improve the text messaging user interface.