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B 2.1

Gifts are the most common tokens of appreciation and have been around for an extremely long time. Hence, many find different ways of improving gifts and the entire experience around giving them to others.

We describe a system and prototype of the AudiBox, a part of a service that can be used by a gift-sender to personalise an online gift with personal verbal audio recordings. The goal of this is to enrich, personalise and improve the experience of digital gift-giving. The recordings made by the gift-giver will be played back by performing different actions. This system came to be by using a reflective and transformative design process and is described by its iterations and qualitative user-centred testing. We conduct 9 pilot and preliminary user tests to examine user responses, as well as conduct an in-depth interview to hear the opinions and suggestions of users to improve the concept. Our studies show that users do find an added verbal audio message to a given gift to have a higher emotional value and bonding between the gift-giver and gift-receiver. The added verbal audio message gave the gift more value and gave a sense of caring by the gift-giver to the gift-receiver.