VibEmoji: Exploring User-authoring Multi-modal Emoticons in Social Communication
This addresses the problem of limited customization and expressiveness in emoticons for users of messaging applications, though it is incremental as it extends existing designs.
The authors tackled the lack of empirical knowledge on user-created multi-modal emoticons in social communication by developing VibEmoji, a mobile interface that allows flexible combination of emoticons, vibrations, and animations with emotional relevance recommendations, and conducted a four-week field study with 20 participants to gather insights and design implications.
Emoticons are indispensable in online communications. With users' growing needs for more customized and expressive emoticons, recent messaging applications begin to support (limited) multi-modal emoticons: e.g., enhancing emoticons with animations or vibrotactile feedback. However, little empirical knowledge has been accumulated concerning how people create, share and experience multi-modal emoticons in everyday communication, and how to better support them through design. To tackle this, we developed VibEmoji, a user-authoring multi-modal emoticon interface for mobile messaging. Extending existing designs, VibEmoji grants users greater flexibility to combine various emoticons, vibrations, and animations on-the-fly, and offers non-aggressive recommendations based on these components' emotional relevance. Using VibEmoji as a probe, we conducted a four-week field study with 20 participants, to gain new understandings from in-the-wild usage and experience, and extract implications for design. We thereby contribute both a novel system and various insights for supporting users' creation and communication of multi-modal emoticons.