Showing your emotions

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Q: What attracted you to this area of research?

I was struck by the surging popularity of emojis, and became interested in investigating their growth and their influence on how we communicate digitally. Since being introduced to the western world in 2011, their use across digital messaging or social media platforms has skyrocketed. A September 2015 report by Emogi found that 92% of the online population are at least occasional emoji users and, in July 2017, Facebook revealed that five billion emojis are sent across its Messenger platform every day. 

Q: Are emojis truly universal or does culture, age and other demographic context affect how they are used or interpreted?

Emojis have a scale of universality, which varies from icon to icon. For example,  ,  and  are widely understood, across demographics and contexts, to be expressions of happiness, love and anger respectively. However, there are many icons where demographic context is vital to understanding intended meaning and likely interpretation(s). Older people are more likely to interpret the aubergine emoji   as a simple vegetable as opposed to something more risqué. 

Additionally, the device you use, or the messaging platform through which you communicate, can influence intention and interpretation. Different emoji ‘fonts’ can change the appearance of some icons to a potentially confounding extent. The most well-documented confounders are Samsung: many of its emojis appear to intentionally buck the design trend seen across other vendors’ designs. For example, its eye-rolling icon  looks expectant, and its smirking icon  looks condescending – very different expressions to their most commonly intended meanings when seen on other devices. 

This is why our research can allow for a greater understanding of use trends and intended meanings.

Q: When interpreting emojis, is the fact that they mostly originate in the US, and have a cultural skew, an inherent problem?

It’s not so much a problem as an obstacle to be conscious of. While there is an argument to be made for a growing western cultural skew in emoji creation (the body that oversees the creation of new emojis consists, predominately, of US-based tech firms), there are more Japan-specific icons in the 2,666 emojis available. Icons that depict objects are often not widely understood outside Japan – such as the emojis displaying Japanese kanji, including  and  (meaning ‘good bargain’ and ‘secret’ respectively). Icons such as the love hotel , white flower  and Shoshinsha mark  are also quite specific to Japanese culture. 

The difficulty in evaluating the interpretation of these icons is when users who are unaware of their intended purpose use them for their own micro-meanings among their peers. If these micro-meanings begin to spread and gain acceptance, then emojis could have multiple, valid interpretations in different contexts. 

Q: Do different rules apply to the uptake and use of emojis than to new words added to our lexicon?

Yes and no. The popularisation processes of words and emojis mirror one another, in that adopting a term or emoji depends on a shared agreement of its use among an audience. However, the way words and emojis are created differ dramatically. 

While anyone, in theory, can put forward a new word or phrase – which can eventually enter the popular lexicon of a nation or culture, a la ‘selfie’ or ‘spoiler’ (terms that didn’t exist a decade ago) – the creation of an emoji is quite a formalised process. It is administered by the international Unicode Consortium, which oversees the standardisation of software and text within digital devices. Anyone can submit a proposal for a new emoji to be added to the Unicode Standard, but an oversight committee signs off proposals. 

So the propagation processes are markedly different: a new emoji can take at least a year and its release across different vendors’ devices will most likely be staggered across a number of months, while a new word or phrase can be adopted overnight if it is disseminated via a large enough platform.

Q: Emojis have been used, mostly, to add emphasis or intent; do you think they raise more problems than they solve?

No – their contribution to our digital communications is a net positive. They can be used to imbue additional meaning into digital, text-based utterances, which are subject to being misinterpreted as more negative in tone than intended (a phenomenon known as Poe’s Law). With continued growth and conformity across platforms, meanings can converge and allow us to complement, augment or even replace particular words or phrases across different contexts – and even between different languages.

Q: How prevalent is their use in a business context?

Emojis are used more in personal communications, but they are growing exponentially in business contexts. Companies’ social media pages, mobile app messaging and B2C messaging platforms have all made more use of emojis. A recent report by Intercom on B2C messaging found that emoji use in business messaging increased fourfold in 2016. Customers were four times more likely to respond to a business message if it contained at least one emoji. 

This is in keeping with previous research into how emojis can positively affect business communications: the presence of congruent, complementary emojis in a social media communication have been shown to increase the social sharing of that communication, as well as the open rates of emails and push notifications. Emojis resonate with people; they humanise business communications and allow companies to engage emotionally with consumers – provided, again, that businesses take heed of the various pitfalls already outlined.

Q: Is it time for brands to include emojis in their tone of voice criteria to prevent mis-use?

Absolutely. While there are many advantages in using emoji in your B2C communications, they are certainly not a one-size-fits-all solution. Brands need a strategy for emojis – to identify which icons convey the sentiments they wish to associate with their products and/or services.

Q: Since their wider take-up, what do you think has been the most significant development in emojis?

The Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee prioritising diversity with the introduction of gendered variations – and, more recently, some non-gender-specific human and activity emojis, as well as skin-tone variations based on the Fitzpatrick scale. This increased the number of icons available dramatically and means users can embody themselves or their peer groups within emojis.

Q: What emoji, that is not yet in existence, do you think is most needed?

There has been a campaign for several years for a red-haired human emoji, which is now on the 2017 candidate shortlist. Additionally, many platforms still do not allow for the Fitzpatrick scale skin-tone variations for multiperson emojis, such as the family icons. While in demand, this is difficult to deliver given the sheer number of possible skin-tone combinations across these icons. For the family icons alone, Windows had to introduce 52,000 combinations – the only platform to do so to date. 

Q: What’s your favourite emoji?

‘Raising hands’:  . I love the sense of positivity, celebration and victory.