Emulating real life interaction through a screen.
The power of emojis
Nikhil S
History
Since they started taking off in the 2010s, emojis have pretty much evolved into characters for a new millennial language. But the predecessors of the “picture characters” we know and use excessively today are older than you’d expect.
Before emojis, there were emoticons or facial expressions made with punctuation marks. The first emoticons appeared in an issue of Puck magazine in 1881 and were called “typographical art.”
The actual emojis were created in 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at the Japanese phone company, NTT Docomo. He was working on a way for customers to communicate through icons. The result was a set of 176 icons he called emoji. The name combines two Japanese words: “e” (picture) and “moji” (character). Kurita says that he drew inspiration for his emojis from manga, Chinese characters, and international signs for bathrooms.
Now, more than 1,800 emojis exist. The best part? We don’t need to tilt our heads sideways to understand them.
Unicode defines Emoji as pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities. To the computer they are simply another character, but people send each other billions of emoji everyday to express love, thanks, congratulations, or any number of a growing set of ideas.
The Premise
My friend Prahalad and I were discussing about emojis one day when this idea was sparked in me. I decided to indulge myself and began some background research. The focus of my research was specifically the Hand Gestures under the Smileys and People category. Emojis like 👍(U+1F44D),✌️(U+270C) or 🤘(U+1F918) are attempts at accurate representations of in-person interaction between people.
However, I believe that innovation in this field is merely limited to the graphics of each emoji. When I interact with a person in real-life and give them a thumbs-up, there is a difference between what I see and what they see. Why shouldn’t the same logic be applied to the emoji when we text someone?
The Approach
I designed some rough renders of what some emoji would look like from the sender’s side and from the receiver’s side.
While the sender of a thumb’s up emoji sees the fingers curling inwards or towards them, the receiver must see the corresponding back of the same hand.
The Proposal
The proposed standard would consist of a simple mapping between emojis to ensure that for a particular Unicode number of an emoji, the relevant view is mapped between sender and receiver.
The Conclusion
Our whole experience with this category of emojis would be revolutionized and the benchmark could be redefined. This upgrade to our interaction with each other through emojis can become a reality in the near future.
Actionable Insights
Pay attention to the mundane and you’ll notice something extraordinary. Always ask them ‘why’ after you’ve asked them ‘why’ twice. The more you question things, the easier it will be to understand the root cause.
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I’m Nikhil S
I am a Product / UX designer. Contact 17nikhil.s@gmail.com for project inquiries. You can experience my work on snikhil.com .
