Group SMS communication is nothing new. UK mobile operators were experimenting with group sms services eight or more years ago, but customers didn’t seem to be interested. More recently, several independent companies have sprung up that offer group SMS services not hugely different from those that the operators put to bed years ago, but their uptake relative to the uptake of SMS itself has been tiny.

This seems odd, at first, because, according to research by Shelly Farnham and Pedram Keyani [1], group SMS services foster two human capabilities that appear to be very valuable: hyper awareness and micro co-ordination. Hyper awareness “refers to the social awareness that individuals share with one another by continually staying in touch across different locations.” Micro co-ordination “is the process by which people co-ordinate the time, place and details of an event from moment to moment”

Based on a ten month trial of a group messaging system called SWARM, Farnham and Keyani also found, amongst other things, that:

• Group text messaging provides a powerful tool for social co-ordination.
• Group text messaging provides a strong sense of connection to which users become very attached.
• People particularly liked the ability to co-ordinate with a group of people without leaving their social context.
• Group text messaging easily integrates into people’s social lives.

In their conclusion, the authors state that “lightweight, mobile group text communication can significantly affect the feeling of connection shared amongst a group of friends, and create new opportunities to share face-to-face social activities.”

If all this is true, why have more people not been using group sms services? The answer lies in the authors’ suggestions for future work: “one of the pitfalls of SMS-based command languages is the difficulty users have in remembering infrequently used commands.”

Zygo’s own research and trials have shown repeatedly that usability is absolutely critical with sms services. This was one of our primary motivations for allocating each group its own, unique, mobile number that becomes the identity for the group.

Many other group SMS services have put the onus of identifying the group onto the user when they are sending a message, and use a shared mobile number or shortcode across all of the groups. In this case, sending a message to the group typically requires the user to prefix their message with, at least, the name of the group. This involves both remembering the name of the group, how it is spelled, and typing in that name each and every time a group message is sent. Let’s put that into the context of one of Zygo’s most recent product trials, which generated 25,000 unique messages from 40 users over three months. If the triallists hadn’t been using Zygo, there would have been 25,000 separate occasions where the group name had to be remembered and typed into the phone before the user got started on the message. You start to see why what seem to be tiny details of service design make a big difference when a service is used in anger.

[1] Shelly Farnham, Pedram Keyani: Swarm: Hyper Awareness, Micro Coordination, and Smart Convergence through Mobile Group Text Messaging. HICSS 2006