"The Perfect One": Understanding Communication Practices and Challenges with Animated GIFs
It addresses communication challenges for users of digital media, but is incremental as it builds on existing research on nonverbal cues in online interactions.
This study investigated how animated GIFs are used in text-based communication and why they can lead to miscommunication, finding that participants rely on contexts like source material and relationships to select GIFs, but these same contexts often cause misunderstandings and usability issues.
Animated GIFs are increasingly popular in text-based communication. Finding the perfect GIF can make conversations funny, interesting, and engaging, but GIFs also introduce potentials for miscommunication. Through 24 in-depth qualitative interviews, this empirical, exploratory study examines the nuances of communication practices with animated GIFs to better understand why and how GIFs can send unintentional messages. We find participants leverage contexts like source material and interpersonal relationship to find the perfect GIFs for different communication scenarios, while these contexts are also the primary reason for miscommunication and some technical usability issues in GIFs. This paper concludes with a discussion of the important role that different types of context play in the use and interpretations of GIFs, and argues that nonverbal communication tools should account for complex contexts and common ground that communication media rely on.