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

TL;DR

VibEmoji is a novel mobile interface enabling users to create and share customizable multi-modal emoticons combining animations, vibrations, and emoticons, supported by a four-week field study revealing user behaviors and design implications.

Contribution

The paper introduces VibEmoji, a flexible user-authoring system for multi-modal emoticons and provides empirical insights from real-world usage to inform future design.

Findings

Users actively combine various emoticons, vibrations, and animations.

Design recommendations improve emotional relevance and user experience.

Empirical data reveal preferences and challenges in multi-modal emoticon creation.

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: 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.