Analysing emergent users' text messages data and exploring its benefits

Abstract

While users in the developed world can choose to adopt the technology that suits their needs, the emergent users cannot afford this luxury, and hence, they adapt themselves to the technology that is readily available. When technology is designed, such as the mobile-phone technology, it is an implicit assumption that it would be adopted by the emergent users in due course. However, such user groups have different needs, and they follow different usage patterns as compared to users from the developed world. In this paper, we target an emergent user base, i.e., users from a university in Pakistan, and analyze their texting behavior on mobile phones. We see interesting results, such as the long-term linguistic adaptation of users in the absence of reasonable Urdu keyboards, the overt preference for communicating in Roman Urdu, and the social forces related to textual interaction. We also present two case studies on how a single dataset can effectively help understand emergent users, improve usability of some tasks, and also help users perform previously difficult tasks with ease.