empathize with emoji
Institute — National institute of design
Discipline — interaction design (batch 2019–2021)
Guiding faculty — Dr. Mamata Rao, Mrs. Jagriti Galphade
Course — systems approach to design
Introduction to research topic
We live in a modern social media era, where you can reach out from anywhere to anyone across the globe and even beyond the globe itself. Computer mediated communication (CMC) today, has broken the barriers of distance and time, of presence and visibility, that we can share simply any kind of information at ease through platforms such as whatsapp, Instagram, facebook, twitter etc.
Communication occurs during interaction, and our need to be connected and interact with others is universal and unavoidable; hidden behind this social instinct there is the even more powerful necessity of giving sense and meanings to our world. Being in touch with others, allows us to create social universes made of symbols — e.g. language, numbers, gestures, emoticons — and social rules, which are shared and understood by everybody.
From the stone ages to this current modern era that we live in, one thing that has not changed in communication face to face (F2F) or CMC, is the exchange of emotions and gestures in conversations and its importance.
Technology and the art of text messaging has been addressing this challenge of making it easy to express emotions while communication through these available platforms. This need to emote through text conversations gave rise various internet globally accepted languages like LOL, OMG, ROFL etc. Also to emote better adding an exclamation mark in the end to express excitement, by typing it out in upper case alphabets to make it louder, typing it in bold to increase its impact and so on was accepted universal codes.
This was further simplified with the introduction of emoticons or emoji. Which by definition means a representation of a facial expression such as a smile or frown, formed by various combinations of keyboard characters and used to convey the writer’s feelings or intended tone.
“The response one gets to his jokes in person, can never be replace by an LOL, ROFL, Or the *tears of joy*.”.
Pain points from the research
Though CMC has the advantages of Enhancing the continuity of individual communication, Improving the quality of relationships, Strengthening emotional communication. It has disadvantages of creating miscommunications, because of absence of visual and tonal cues, thereby making it deceiving. The invention of emoji has addressed this problem by helping one emote better while communicating.
There are 3019 emojis accepted by the UNICODE Standards today. In the year 2019, the “tears of joy” emoji was titled the word of the year by oxford. The existence of various websites like emoji tracker, emojipedia to discuss the use and meaning of emoji narrates the importance of them in communication today. There even exist an world emoji day celebrated on july 17 across the globe along with a emoji anthem!
Diversity of this platform
Emoji is a platform that cannot exist on its own, but also diverse in its own. It varies in its style based on the platform
It exists in various categories and classifications. New emojis are being created and discussed by UNICODE almost every other day. The categories include smileys, people, animals, nature, food, drink, activity, travel, places, flags etc. they help us to express positive, neutral or negative information at ease with their usage.
Efficiency in its usage
This diverse palette of emoji that is available in our keypads often leads to confusions. People find it hard to understand the meanings of the emojis. The following image shows a few examples,
Insights from the research
- Emojis always do not convey what one wants to convey
- Lack of awareness to understand the meaning and usage of emoji as mentioned by Unicode standard
- Older people find it difficult to access the emoji keypad
- People with vision problems can find the emoji keypad difficult to find, understand and use
- Using emojis while being dependent on text to speech engines like voice over (iOS) or Talkback (Android) is difficult.
The iceberg model
Based on the design research and the insights from it, to decode the patterns, underlying structures and to excavate the underlying mental models of people while using emojis, we apply the theory of Iceberg model considering the following events.
Event 1, was to consider a very simple scenario like using the tears of joy emoji and see the impact it creates on the text messages we send and receive.
Event 2 , to assume a situation where you have to send greetings to a family member expressing emotions of joy and to understand the use of emoji in this scenario considered.
Event 3, we all might have come across such a situation where we receive a bunch of random emoji which is not related to text conversation we might be having. why do such situations arise?
Event 4 , we all understand the use and compelling importance of emoji in crafting a text message. what about a visually disabled person sending and receiving an emoji. how would his text to speech or speech to text engines react to the situation.
To conclude, In this module I would like to explore the possibilities of creating an interface to transmit emotions , which at the ease of use eliminates the difficulties that one may find while using the keypad to emote. Thereby eliminating the miscommunications created while using emojis in text messages. To see and understand what are the possible futures of emoji in the field of design.
