VibEmoji: Exploring User-authoring Multi-modal Emoticons in Social Communication

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Date

2023-01-06

Authors

Zhou, Ziqi

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University of Waterloo

Abstract

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:, 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 to both a novel system and various insights for supporting users’ creation and communication of multi-modal emoticons.

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human computer interaction

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