24 percent of the total communications situations. This explained why conventional MIM would not be successful as a replacement for SMS. The lives of young Koreans were often not conducive to intensive real-time chatting; they were in class, walking around, or at work—in many cases unable to focus on a conversation. In addition, users could not decide at the beginning of the exchange whether a conversation would be real-time or fragmented (intensive or intermittent). Further, it was usually not clear when the conversation was completed. Since these Koreans could not determine the type of conversation in advance, they were also unable to decide which tool to use (SMS or MIM); as a result, they tended to always choose the familiar SMS as the default option. Our analysis led us to believe there was a need for a communications tool that could support various types of conversations.

We came up with six user
requirements from the Green
Label of the Affinity Diagram,
based on 320 pieces of user data
(see Figure 4). The six require-
ments are as follows:
(a) Must be able to communi-
cate without being tied up in a
conversation
(b) Fees must be reasonable
(d) Must be able to select the
appropriate mode of communi-
cation
(e) Must be able to play with
friends via cell phone
(f) Must be able to store mes-
sages effectively
Conventional MIM failed
because it could not meet user
requirement (a). The MIM users,
waiting for a reply, had to keep
their cell phones up and run-
ning to receive any response,
while SMS users could put the
phone away and forget about
the message while doing some-
thing else.

We chose “not to talk” as
our primary persona, because
we felt that if we could satisfy
this persona, we could prob-
ably meet the needs of the
others. “Not to talk” individu-
als do not like to text message,
and most work in front of a PC,

January + February 2010