Is ‘additional’ effort always negative? Understanding discretionary work in interpersonal communications

This paper describes a position on the meaning of effort in interaction design, particularly for communication systems. We make use of interview data to illustrate our ongoing research on how people invest discretionary effort when using communication technologies in personal relationships. Discretionary effort refers to work that, while arguably additional to the delivery of a message, is done to convey meaning to the participants in an interaction. We describe early findings that have the potential to extend current knowledge on the value of effort in communications.